One of the more prominent ethereum second layer solution, Optimism, has raised $150 million at a valuation of $1.65 billion.
Stripe, Paradigm, a16z, Nascent and others participated with Jinglan Wang, the co-founder and CEO of Optimism, stating:
“There are many ways to raise capital. But as a young startup, it’s important to have investors who operate as partners.”
The team claims they’ve saved $1 billion in on-chain fees so far for their users, with Chris Dixon of Andreessen Horowitz stating:
“Scaling Ethereum is an important near-term challenge, and will dramatically expand the design space for web3 apps.
We’re co-leading Optimism’s series B round to continue supporting one of the most innovative projects in this space.”
Web3 is a rising vision to add blockchain capabilities to the internet so that users own the platform. But if they don’t own the base infrastructure, in this case Optimism, can they really own the dapps running on it?
Ethereum is no longer fully pursuing scaling solutions like sharding. Projects like Optimism therefore, depending on who succeeds out of the many second layers (L2), will effectively become ethereum to a great extent.
Thus all the qualities that are important in the ethereum network, are also important in these second layers, including public ownership.
A fork of Optimism thus, Metis, has overtaken Optimism in assets under management at $740 million, while Optimism has $470 million as pictured above.
Arbitrum is far bigger than both at $3 billion total value locked, but they don’t have a token either with this second layer onboarding currently at a very high competition stage as markets wait to see who strikes the right balance to emulate the qualities of the ethereum network while also offering capacity.
