Optimism Raises $150M in Series B Round

Ethereum Layer 2 scaling startup Optimism has announced a $150 million Series B funding round.

Optimism’s Series B

Optimism has announced a $150 million Series B funding round.

Led by some of the most prominent firms in the industry, including Paradigm and Andreessen Horowitz, the round brings the startup’s valuation to $1.65 billion. The funding round comes more than a year after Optimism’s Series A round, which was led by a16z last February.

Optimism is a Layer 2 scaling solution for Ethereum that employs optimistic rollups as means of moving bulky transaction data off the main blockchain. While it relies on Ethereum’s consensus mechanism to ensure its underlying security, Optimism is able to help the network scale by storing its blocks within a special smart contract called the Canonical Transaction Chain (CTC).

In a blog post, the team at Optimism claimed to have cut fees by more than 30% over the last year while focusing much of its attention on providing the best developer experience possible. The team also claimed to have saved users over $1 billion in gas fees, with Calldata compression slated to go live in weeks. The team also noted its plans to contribute to EIP-4844. 

In an interview with TechCrunch, Optimism’s chief executive Jinglan Wang said,

“We want to be future proof, so we’re not closing the doors to the possibility of integrating a ZK [Ethereum Virtual Machine] down the line. We’re also pragmatics, and we don’t want our work to toil forever in academic hell; we want people to use it.” 

Optimism has lagged Arbitrum, another Optimistic rollup, in terms of total value locked by a large margin. However, Arbitrum has suffered from network outages before. Both Optimism and Aributrum (and Polygon) saw Aave V3 deployments this week. 

Disclosure: At the time of writing, the author of this piece owned BTC, ETH, and several other cryptocurrencies.