Jinglan Wang & Karl Floersch: Optimism – The Optimistic Approach to Ethereum Scaling
The Plasma Group was a not for profit research group focussing on layer-2 scaling on Ethereum. Optimism is a new Public Benefit Corporation that builds on the lessons of the Plasma research and is implementing Optimistic Rollups. This solution scales Eth 1.x and offers near-instant transaction finality on Ethereum, while providing over 100x transaction throughput. Jinglan Wang and Karl Floersch, co-founders of Optimism, explain the transition to this new entity and its goals moving forward.
Topics covered in this episode:
- Jinglan and Karl's backgrounds and how they came to work together
- How the Plasma Group and all of the Plasma research evolved into Optimism
- Funding of Optimism through Gitcoin, and the lessons learned from donation funding
- What are Optimistic Rollup and how they achieve scaling
- How to make an Optimistic Rollup chain
- Optimistic Rollups compared to other scaling solutions like Truebit, sharding and zkRollups
- How Optimistic Rollups fit within the Eth 2.0 roadmap
- The role of an aggregator and how to become one
- Submitting transactions, the fees involved, and different finality levels
- Problems that could arise from mining transactions on incorrect states
- Who is using the OVM alpha and what's next for the project
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/336