Optimism has launched its solution to Ethereum’s transaction problem, the Optimistic Virtual Machine (OVM).
The startup announced on Friday that OVM is now live, at a time when gas fees for DeFi (decentralized finance) traders have hit near all-time highs. In fact, the cost of sending a single Ethereum transaction was hovering in the low single digit dollars for the past month – a bit steep for the “internet of money”.
First up is DeFi Exchange Synthetix, which has been working on an integration for several weeks. The platform enables traders to exchange Ethereum-based synthetic contracts of real assets including oil futures.
The transition will be carried out in four phases to limit risk to the platform, Synthetix co-founder Kain Warwick wrote on Jan. 14 blog entry. Staking out the platform’s native token, SNX, is now possible on OVM, the team said.
“We decided to initiate the transition with the absolute minimum risk [layer one]and then add features over the next few months as we build trust [Optimistic Ethereum]Warwick wrote.
Optimism, formerly known as Plasma Group, has launched an implementation of so-called Optimistic Rollups (ORs). OPs – or other roll-up variants such as ZK rollups – are layer 2 solutions that serve as throughput boosters for blockchains. (These are generally no different from Bitcoin’s Lightning Network.)
A Rollup allowed A blockchain that will allow more transactions to be processed across the network by sending out-of-chain transactions, validating them, and then setting the blanket value for Ethereum’s main blockchain. Most dapps have a roll-up solution on the agenda.
In conjunction with other technical solutions, Ethereum is expected to be able to do this execute and do approx. 100,000 transactions per second (TPS) with rollups.