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

Episode Summary

Optimism is a new Public Benefit Corporation that builds on the lessons of the Plasma research and is implementing Optimistic Rollups. Jinglan Wang and Karl Floersch, co-founders of Optimism, explain the transition to this new entity and its goals moving forward.

Episode Notes

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