Last week, Jack Niewold, the founder of Crypto Pragmatist, tweeted that he heard some market rumors that one of Arbitrum, Optimism, zkSync and Starknet may issue tokens next month.
This blockbuster news quickly attracted high attention and heated discussions in the market. As for which project was finally unbearable, everyone also started the prophet mode. There were also predictions inside Odally at the time, and I bet on Optimism with the mentality of singing a different tune. I didn’t expect that now it seems to be a “full word”.
On the morning of April 20th, Optimism officially published "A New Chapter". The article reviewed the past progress of the project, including data results and financing progress, etc. At the end of the article,Optimism said something hard not to let people think about it - "Optimism is about to start a new chapter driven by 'community ownership and governance'", under the general understanding of the market, this is Optimism's hint for the upcoming token issuance.
born with a golden spoon
The predecessor of Optimism was the Plasma Group, an Ethereum expansion research organization focusing on Plasma expansion solutions. As the Rollup program has gradually overtaken Plasma and become the mainstream route for Ethereum expansion in the past few years, Plasma Group announced in early 2020 that it was renamed Optimism and started Advance towards the Layer 2 expansion of Optimistic Rollup.
As one of the earliest Layer 2 expansion projects that selected the rollup direction,Optimism has been collectively favored by leading capital and DeFi protocols since the announcement of the plan.
In early 2020, Optimism received US$3.5 million in seed round financing from Paradigm and IDEO; in February 2021, a16z led Optimism’s US$25 million A round of investment; in March this year, Optimism was valued at US$1.65 billion Completed $150 million Series B financing, co-led by a16z and Paradigm.
At the beginning of 2021, Optimism launched the mainnet soft launch (trial run) of its expansion plan. At that time, Uniswap, Compound, and Synthetix were deeply involved. After the mainnet was officially launched in the summer, Optimism soon ushered in Uniswap The official deployment of v3 has become the latter's first new ecology outside of the Ethereum mainnet.
It is no exaggeration to say that for a long period of time, Optimism has been regarded as the "chosen son" who is more in line with the will of the upper-level community of Ethereum, and many people have placed their expectations on the expansion of Ethereum. However, the subsequent development of the story was beyond most people's expectations.
development tends to be weak
Let's fast forward to today, Defi Llama data shows that as of 10:30, the total value of Optimism's locked funds is "only" 496 million US dollars.
Leaving aside the Layer1 public chain that actually belongs to the same competition dimension, we only compare it within the Layer2 project.Optimism's locked-up funds are several times behind Arbitrum's $2.28 billion, another major Optimistic Rollup expansion solution, and the gap between Polygon ($4.22 billion), a potential rival that has acquired several Rollup projects, is even more pronounced.
As for why Optimism has gradually become weak in actual development, there have been many macro-level analyzes on the market. Here, I will directly quote the analysis published by Footprint analyst Alina at the end of last year (see"Three reasons why Optimism has changed from being favored to being left behind"). According to the analyst, Optimism’s weakness can be attributed to three reasons:
Reason 1: Optimism is not 100% EVM compatible
The current way to expand the transaction volume in the market is to use Turing's complete programming to be compatible with off-chain EVM instructions, so that everyone can directly execute solidity programs off-chain. And Optimism hopes to realize smart contracts on the chain through OVM, so that smart contracts can accept and execute EVM-compatible instructions off-chain, so as to ensure that OVM bytecodes can be mapped to EVM one by one. But this kind of mapping may only have about 20 bytecodes, which makes Optimism unable to achieve 100% EVM compatibility, and the development cost is slightly higher.
Odaily note:After a round of upgrades, Optimism is now fully compatible with the EVM, with no change in development costs.
Reason 2: Optimism's whitelist deployment mechanism
Another point that hinders Optimism is that only contracts that pass the whitelist can be deployed, which makes many new projects or many projects that are willing to wait for the middle waist. The reason why Optimism uses the whitelist is mainly to build a new anti-fraud system, but it is by no means easy and requires a lot of time and experience.
Odaily note:The whitelist mechanism was officially canceled earlier, and the ecological deployment has been fully opened.
Reason 3: The current "anti-VC" culture in the encryption community
The development of Optimism has the brand of VC (venture capital) capital blessing, and Paradigm and a16z were its platforms in the early days. Compared with Arbitrum, which is also Optimistic Rollup, it feels more like a community project. The current crypto community with a "slightly anti-VC" culture does not seem to like Optimism.
Odaily Note: In fact, all Layer 2 has VC endorsement, but the early community suspected that VC coerced Uniswap and other leaders to only deploy on Optimism, so it attracted some opposition.
Regarding the gradual decline of Optimism, there are other opinions on the market. For example, the biggest problem with Optimism is that the development process is slightly slow, which caused Arbitrum to seize the opportunity.
Here, I would like to add a micro example. Last spring, I interviewed L, the founder of a DeFi project whose token was listed on Coinbase. At that time, the project was considering expanding to Layer2 ecology.
L mentioned to me that the project finally chose Arbitrum and gave up Optimism, because Arbitrum will give more support to the project party, and they will actively help you solve all problems in the integration process. On the contrary, Optimisim is very supportive throughout the communication "High and cold", has always been a bit "love to answer and ignore".
This is just a small example of Optimism from the perspective of the project side, although it is not very representative,However, it can be seen to some extent that the closed development strategy that Optimism adhered to in the early days is not as pleasing as the more open Arbitrum at the community level.
Issuing coins: the beginning of breaking the game?
With the passage of time, the competition on the Layer2 track has also become increasingly fierce. Before that, Arbitrum's data was "crushed", followed by the pressing of the ZK duo, and the successive rise of some new projects (such as Metis' TVL once has surpassed Optimism), and Optimism is undoubtedly under increasing pressure.
If we can still say a few words in the early days that "the project is more expensive than more", then as DeFi leaders have now chosen multi-chain deployment strategies, such as Uniswap, it has also begun to expand to new ecologies such as Moonbeam. Optimism used to be only The project quality advantage of China seems to have been equalized or even surpassed.
Under high pressure, Optimism will inevitably need to think about ways to break the situation. Referring to public chains, side chains, and some Layer 2 previous ecological outbreak stories, the most direct and effective way may be to attract more users to participate through huge incentives, thereby bringing more More funds and activities on the chain, and then revitalize the overall situation.
So how should incentives be implemented? The answer is naturally inseparable from tokens. Regarding whether the Layer 2 that can use ETH needs native tokens, the community has had many rounds of discussions before. I used to think this is a difficult question to answer, but now from the standpoint of Optimism, the answer seems self-evident— —If you want to develop the ecology, you need incentives, and you need native tokens as the incentive medium (you can’t directly use ETH as incentives).
Following this logic,Issuing coins seems to be the way Optimism has to go to break the situation.As one of the four major Layer 2 expansion solutions, Optimism has never lacked technical strength and market attention. If it can be used to push further, its development prospects are theoretically worth looking forward to.
Some predictions about the airdrop
The coin issuance of leading projects can always ignite the mood of the wool party.
Unsurprisingly, there will be a round of large-scale airdrops in Optimism’s coin issuance (if it is issued), but personally, I don’t recommend everyone to go crazy and interact with fomo.
There are two reasons. One is that, as a leading project that has been at the forefront of the "Must-Pick-Up List" for a long time, Optimism has been "pick-up" by wool parties for a year or two. The project party can naturally see these data, even if it is There are airdrops, there is a high probability that there will be some unpredictable screening mechanisms, and even reverse screening can be carried out for group operation behaviors, and finally get the results you want; second, projects like Optimism that have gone through several years of development often have It’s going all the way, taking snapshots all the way, so even if there is an airdrop, the snapshot time can be selected before the news of the coin issuance, so as to avoid further amplification of speculative interactions as much as possible.
Therefore, I personally do not recommend that you ignore the cost to interact in batches. Relatively speaking, it is more recommended that you use common addresses to play more, whether it is cross-layer or transaction, it is not too bad to try your luck while experiencing Optimism in real life. good.
