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a16z and Paradigm The Ethereum scaling startup Optimism has a valuation of $1.65 billion

During the recent crypto bull run, many new crypto users were startled to see slow, pricey transactions on the Ethereum network for the first time.

The Ethereum blockchain has played a critical role in the development of a web3 crypto internet, but it has been unable to keep up with the growing demand for its services. While some developers are building competing blockchains on entirely different infrastructure, others are focusing their efforts on building modular blockchain solutions that sit on top of Ethereum, allowing them to bundle transactions faster and cheaper while keeping a record of the movements on the central blockchain.

Venture investors have been scrambling to stake claims on "Layer 2" (L2) solutions that they believe might be the key interface for how users engage with decentralized apps, mint NFTs, and transfer money around in Ethereum's fast developing network, according to most blockchain developers. There have been many unicorn acquisitions this year. Silicon Valley's most prominent crypto investors, Paradigm and Andreessen Horowitz, have stepped increased their support for scaling startup Optimism.

Scaling Ethereum has concluded a $1.65 billion Series B fundraising round headed by Andreessen Horowitz and Paradigm, the company says TechCrunch.

According to L2Beat, the "total value locked" (TVL) on L2 platforms has increased dramatically in the last year, from $5.25 billion to $5.75 billion. Offchain Labs' Arbitrum is closing in on roughly $3 billion in TVL as the industry leader, but optimism is reaching $500 million in TVL. In contrast, Optimism has an open-source codebase that has already spawned several popular forks, unlike some of its rivals.

Our public promise that we would not benefit from centralizing elements of the system led us to want to eliminate our own financial motivation to do so, according to Optimism CEO Jinglan Wang in an interview with TechCrunch. "While we're generating money, we're reinvesting it entirely in Ethereum's public benefits. Rather than simply saying we want to be decentralized, we also want to demonstrate the community that we're building up our own incentives to be consistent with it."

Zero-Knowledge (ZK) rollups and Optimistic rollups are two of the most popular L2 solutions. Optimism is built on Optimistic rollup technology, which has been considered as a more near-term practical option owing to some of the cryptographic complexity of ZK rollups, which are employed by other networks established by firms like StarkWare and Matter Labs.

If the ZK [Ethereum Virtual Machine] is ever implemented, Wang says, "we're not closing the doors to the potential of incorporating a ZK." Pragmatists, we don't want our work buried in a library for the rest of time; we want it to be put into practice.

For more over a year, optimism has been freely available on a public "mainnet." After discovering a flaw that would have allowed criminals to generate money on the network, the business recently handed out a $2 million bug bounty to security researcher Saurik. Among blockchain startups, this award was one of the largest.

"We're extremely into developing out in the open, every piece of code we create is open source as we write it, and similarly we're honest about the vulnerabilities and defects that are detected and published in our network," Wang explains. In order to develop a strong security culture around the Optimist community, we want to ensure that ethical hackers know they will be rewarded generously if they discover security flaws.

As a result, Optimism has been working to reduce the complexity of its codebase and promote interoperability with Ethereum-based code so that developers don't have to modify their existing apps to be compatible with the Optimism blockchain platform. According to the business, the "Bedrock" update is doubling down on so-called "EVM-equivalence" and is expected to save expenses on the network by 50%.

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