Optimism

Everybody and their mother working on blockchains loves the word “decentralization”. On a broad, world-changing scale, we can all agree that it’s important. Yet, when we zoom into the specifics of how to build this decentralized world, we find many diverse approaches. Whether it’s defi, identity, art, healthcare, or anything in between, a single dependency unites each dream for the future: scalability.

We at OP Labs are building the critical infrastructure to address this need -- a protocol called Optimism -- an extension to Ethereum that scales both its technology and philosophy and enables orders of magnitude more performance. Ethereum will enable the greatest change in human coordination since the birth of the internet, and through the Optimism protocol, OP Labs is here to help bring it to the masses.

Optimism is a Layer 2 scaling solution for Ethereum that can support all of Ethereum's Dapps. Instead of running all computation and data on the Ethereum network, Optimism puts all transaction data on-chain and runs computation off-chain, increasing Ethereum’s transactions per second and decreasing transaction fees.

OUR PHILOSOPHY

Optimism is a Public Benefit Corporation, a for profit corporation that is obligated to balance the financial interests of our stockholders with the best interests of our community, and society.

Not only are we writing software that scales Ethereum technology, we are also scaling Ethereum values ​​by creating the rails for highly impactful projects that don’t have a business model to succeed.

design philosophy
Optimism is built according to a strong design philosophy that stands on four main pillars: simplicity, pragmatism, sustainability, and, of course, optimism. It's important to understand these pillars as they heavily influence the design of Optimism as a whole.

#simplicity
Optimism is designed to be as simple as possible for the featureset it provides. Ideally, Optimism should be composed of the minimum number of moving parts required for a secure, scalable, and flexible L2 system. This simplicity gives Optimism's design a number of significant advantages over other more complex L2 constructions. Simplicity reduces engineering overhead, which in turn means we can spend our time working on new features instead of re-creating existing ones. Optimism prefers to use existing battle-tested Ethereum code and infrastructure where possible. The most visible example of this philosophy in practice is the choice to use Geth as Optimism's client software.

pragmatism
For all its idealism, the design process behind Optimism is ultimately driven by pragmatism. The core Optimism team has real-world constraints, the projects that build on Optimism have real-world needs, and the users that engage with Optimism have real-world problems. Optimism's design philosophy prioritizes user and developer needs over theoretical perfection. Sometimes the best solution isn't the prettiest one.

Optimism is also developed with the understanding that any core team will have limited areas of expertise. Optimism is developed iteratively and strives to continously pull feedback from users. Many core Optimism features today (like EVM Equivalence ) were only made possible by this iterative approach to protocol development.

Sustainability
Optimism is in it for the long haul. Application developers need assurance that the platform they're building on will remain not only operational but competitive over long periods of time. Optimism's design process is built around the idea of ​​long-term sustainability and not taking shortcuts to scalability. At the end of the day, a scalable system means nothing without the ecosystem that sustains it.

Sustainability actively influences Optimism's protocol design in ways that go hand-in-hand with our philosophy of simplicity. The more complex a codebase, the more difficult it is for people outside of the core development team to actively contribute. By keeping our codebase simple we're able to build a bigger community of contributors who can help maintain the protocol long-term.

optimism
Of course, none of this would be possible without a sense of optimism. Our optimism about the Ethereum vision keeps this project moving forward. We believe in an optimistic future for Ethereum, a future where we get to redesign our relationships to the institutions that coordinate our lives.

Although Optimism looks like a standalone blockchain, it's ultimately designed as an extension to Ethereum. We keep this in mind whenever we're creating new features or trying to simplify existing ones. Optimism is as close to Ethereum as possible not only for pragmatic reasons, but because Optimism exists so that Ethereum can succeed. We hope that you can see the influence of this philosophy when looking at Optimism's design.