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Jinglan Wang & Karl Floersch: Optimism – The Optimistic Approach to Ethereum Scaling

Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies

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

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