TL;DR Breakdown
- Optimism has postponed its mainnet launch to July.
- The team noted that the mainnet would be launched with support from the community.
The development team behind Optimism, another Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solution, disclosed on Friday that it’s public mainnet will no longer be released later this month. The team is targeting the next four months (July) to work on the launch of its mainnet. According to them, the mainnet can only be launched when the entire Ethereum community is ready and stable.
“Opening mainnet to the public is not something we can do alone. […] It will be a collaborative effort between us, projects, and core infrastructure providers like oracles, wallets, nodes & explorers,” the team noted.
Recently, Cryptopolitan reported that the next iteration of the popular decentralized exchange, Uniswap, will also launch on Optimism to enable significantly cheaper transaction fees on Uniswap V3. It remains unknown whether the development today would affect the deployment of Uniswap V3 in May.
Optimism increases Ethereum’s throughput
Just as transaction fees on Ethereum were hitting the roof, the team at Optimism soft-launched the scaling solution, the Optimistic Virtual Machine (OVM), with Synthetix decentralized exchange, earlier this year. The network uses “optimistic rollups to achieve far lower fees, far lower latency, and far greater throughput versus Ethereum Layer 1.”
So far, Synthetix users have saved about $10 million in transaction fees from over 100,000 completed transactions. The idea of using rollups is proving very effective and efficient in scaling the currently-congested Ethereum network. Even the co-founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, supported the idea.
Early this month, Buterin disclosed that the Ethereum developers were planning to deploy rollups to scale the network by 100x, which should sustain the network until sharding is deployed. He said:
“Rollups are coming very soon. we’re fully confident that by the time that we need any more scaling of that, sharding will have already been ready for a long time by then.”
