Blazing an Optimistic Trail on Ethereum

Optimism — an Ethereum Layer 2 solution featuring an optimistic rollup — plans to decentralize governance through the release of tokens.

Network has elaborated on the token launch OP in this week’s blog post. Although not the first Layer 2 to activate tokens, the token distribution mechanism and overall governance structure envisions an equivalent “house” bicameral system of “citizen’s house” and “token’s house”. It is novel in that it is. .. “

“With tokens, governance rights could be purchased in the open market,” Chief Technology Officer Karl Florsch said in a bankless podcast.

The plan calls for an “optimistic group.” This is specifically aimed at preventing the centralization of rights of sovereignty in the hands of financial interests. “It’s more equal,” Floersch said.

Optimism PBC’s system architect, a utility company rebranded as OP Labs, has created a “balanced, decentralized bottom-up governance system for people” rather than following a one-token, one-vote structure. I aimed. .. “

A Layer 2 implementation built on Ethereum’s mainnet inherits Ethereum’s security, but at the same time it can increase transaction throughput while reducing gas charges (the cost of block space on the network). According to L2beat, optimism is now the third largest layer 2 in total, after Arbitrum and dYdX, at $ 670 million.

Tokens have typically been used to bootstrap liquidity in new protocols, but Optimism was boosted early by becoming the first Layer 2 Uniswap announced to deploy a major dex protocol. rice field. Another decentralized finance (DeFi) good chip, Synthetix, has adopted the network as the rollup solution of its choice.

A new kind of airdrop

Optimism co-founder and CEO Jinglan Wang and former Chief Scientist Ben Jones will move to the new Optimism Foundation, which will fund external teams to build the OP ecosystem.

It goes without saying that OP tokens are not yet billable and can be traded in the secondary market, but the team sought not to emphasize its role.

“Tokens lack the point of this: building a new system of public good governance and financing mechanisms,” Jones said.

Wang said the problem with Web 2 was plutocracy. The Optimism team is trying to avoid “sneaky plutocracy.” This allows participants in the Optimism network to coordinate without being preyed on by “centralization pressure”.

To that end, the power of governance lies with the “citizens,” the holders of NFTs distributed by projects built on optimism. But unlike most NFTs (non-fungible tokens) today, they are “soul-bound”, that is, fixed to a specific address, one person. It cannot be transferred or sold.

The details are still inadequate, but the team envisions a grassroots network and seeds a “net of trust” on the chain that grows over time. Independent projects determine which community members best represent the community’s interests in optimistic governance.

The idea has been well received by the broader Ethereum community, and co-founder Vitalik Buterin called it “the biggest endeavor of DAO governance that hasn’t been token-owner-centric so far.” I’m out.

The first AirDrop aimed to be a “super fair” with a wide distribution and built-in Sybil resistance by rewarding a series of difficult game movements. However, this is the first in a series of airdrops used to encourage optimism and activities that help grow Ethereum more broadly by distributing public goods funds to recipients from the entire Ethereum development. It’s just a thing.

The team sees governance experiments as a testbed for future evolution of the Internet as a whole.

“Now we are sitting at an inflection … this is the moment when the Internet is most urgently needed to solve human expression, identity, and these problems we face,” Floersch said. Told.

“Humanity is important. To make sure our network reflects our values, we need to acquire and fight our rights as people and individuals.”

Deliver the day’s top crypto news and insights to your inbox every night. Subscribe to Blockworks’ free newsletter now.