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 togetherHow the Plasma Group and all of the Plasma research evolved into OptimismFunding of Optimism through Gitcoin, and the lessons learned from donation fundingWhat are Optimistic Rollup and how they achieve scalingHow to make an Optimistic Rollup chainOptimistic Rollups compared to other scaling solutions like Truebit, sharding and zkRollupsHow Optimistic Rollups fit within the Eth 2.0 roadmapThe role of an aggregator and how to become oneSubmitting transactions, the fees involved, and different finality levelsProblems that could arise from mining transactions on incorrect statesWho is using the OVM alpha and what's next for the project

Episode links:

Optimism WebsitePlasma Group WebsiteIntroducing the OVM - Plasma Group Blog""Ethereum Smart Contracts in L2: Optimistic Rollup - Plasma Group BlogA New Way to Scale - Optimized Optimistic Rollup — IDEX BlogOptimism TwitterJinglan Wang TwitterKarl Floersch Twitter

Sponsors:

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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/336