Opossum's Week in Optimism #2
Edition #2, week of 2022-03-21
Hello world. This is the second edition of Opossum’s Week in Optimism, a weekly review of what’s happening in the Optimism ecosystem. And what a week it’s been! I would like to thank all of the people who shared the first edition of this newsletter last week. It seems the Optimism team caught wind of this and spread it around. ❤️
The top line
What a week for Optimism! Calldata compression, Huobi deposits and withdrawals, a massive fundraise, Aave V3, and great content about public goods funding. It’s a good time to be an Optimism users. Transactions are up and Optimism once again crushed its 7 day record for contract deployments with almost 880 new contracts deployed. I wonder what people are deploying…
Gas prices are still pretty low. If you’ve been thinking about moving some funds over to Optimism, now’s the time! Head over to the Optimism Gateway if you’re looking to cheaply deposit into Optimism. You can also take a look at Hop, Connext, or Celer for great, cheap alternative options to the official bridge.
New project launches and updates
Optimism Ecosystem Dashboard
Here’s your weekly reminder: don’t forget that you can find a massive list of projects currently running on Optimism inside the Ecosystem Dashboard. You can find every project under the sun there. The Optimism ecosystem is HUGE!
Huobi Global
FINALLY! Huobi Global is the first exchange to support deposits and withdrawal of ETH to/from Optimism! This is huge news since it makes moving ETH to and from Optimism much cheaper for people who are willing to go through a centralized exchange. Great job to Huobi and to the Optimism team for shipping this. 👏
Aave
Another insane launch this week as Aave V3 went live on Optimism and several other chains at the same time. Optimism’s market is looking juicy with over $1M in assets available to borrow. Check it out yourself and try lending or borrowing some assets! Feels good knowing that we finally have a lending platform with tons of liquidity on Optimism.
Kwenta Futures Beta
Kwenta just announced that their Futures Beta program is live on Optimism mainnet. Kwenta Futures allows you to trade ETH, BTC, and LINK per contracts with up to 10x leverage, completely on-chain. Kwenta is a great example of the sort of applications that you can really only build on Optimism. Go make some money (responsibly) trading futures! 🎉
DappRadar
Another important building block, DappRadar, is finally planning to integrate Optimism. DappRadar makes it easy to discover various dapps on Optimism. Who knows, maybe it’ll be even better than the Optimism Ecosystem Dashboard…
Superfluid
We talked about Superfluid in last week’s edition but it wasn’t deployed to Optimism yet. Superfluid was deployed this week! We finally have a cheap way to handle cashflow streams on Optimism, another crucial DeFi primitive.
This week’s exciting stats
TVL and On-Chain Value
Another week, another $100M in TVL for Optimism. Both TVL and On-Chain Value are way up this week. On-Chain Value is up by more than $150M to almost $780M.
TVL (which only counts what’s been locked in bridges, not tokens created on L2) is over $560M, which is enough money to fill an olympic swimming pool with $100 bills (maybe, I didn’t actually do the math).
Contract deployments
For the second week in a row, Optimism has broken its record for the number of contract deployments in a 7 day period. It looks like there was a crazy spike of deployments on March 24 where over 500 contracts were deployed. Weird, huh? Maybe we’ll see some crazy new projects going public soon…
Transacting Addresses
The number of addresses actively sending transactions on Optimism is trending upwards again after a dip in January and February. The spring of L222 is finally arriving and the red Optimistic sun is feeling warm!
Releases
Optimism definitely looks like a team that can’t stop shipping. Optimism recently hit 1000 releases of its software on GitHub. That is a lot of releases. Remember, go give the Optimism GitHub repository a star to show your support and to help the repository show up on other feeds.
From the Optimism news desk
Another crazy week of tweets from @optimismPBC.
Calldata compression
It’s what we’ve all been waiting for. CALLDATA COMPRESSION IS LIVE ON OPTIMISM MAINNET! As someone who uses Optimism regularly, I can say that I am very excited for the 40% fee reduction. It never feels good to spend ETH on transaction fees when I could be saving it… for more transactions. Congratulations to the Optimism team for being the first optimistic rollup to ship this very important feature.
It seems that the actual fee reduction will happen next week but at least it’s coming.
$150M Series B
Optimism announced a $150M Series B fundraising round that values Optimism at $1.65B. The round was led by a16z and Paradigm who also led Optimism’s $25M Series A. In a Twitter space with Synthetix, Ben from the Optimism team said Optimism currently has more than 30 employees and that most of this money will go to expanding the team even more. Ben also said that this money will help Optimism survive any potential crypto winter. Congratulations to the Optimism team on this fundraising round.
Ether’s Phoenix
Optimism has always been very invested in the idea of public goods funding. Optimism’s new post about Ether’s Phoenix is a look into the ideology behind this investment. Here is a great quote from the article that I thought was a good insight into Optimism’s mindset:
Despite these tools, many current attempts to coordinate large-scale action are failing. Planetary health is in rapid decline. Open source software is underfunded. Public and common goods don’t receive the support they need to survive long term.
Why is it that crucial things which stand to benefit all of us are being neglected and, more importantly, what can we do about it? In a moment where coordination is overshadowed by defection and common ground is hard to find, how do we choose the path which leads to a better future? Enter Ether’s Phoenix.
I highlighted the sentence that resonated the most with me. Public goods don’t receive the support they need even though we all benefit from them. Optimism’s commitment to public goods is important for a future where we can all prosper. Like @optimismPBC said: together, we will summon Ether’s Phoenix!
Cannon Bounty
We talked about this last week but I’m re-posting it because it seems important. The Optimism team is running a bug bounty program for Cannon, the next-gen fault proof system. You can win $50k every time you break Cannon. Seems like a good deal!
Podcasts, Spaces, and Blog Posts
Synthetix x Optimism
Ben from Optimism and Kain from Synthetix held a great Twitter space on Tuesday as part of L222 Tuesdays.
Across Protocol x Optimism
Ben from Optimism joined the Across Protocol team in another Twitter space that covered bridging, security, and the blockchain endgame. Worth listening if you want to learn more about bridges.
The end, for now
That’s all for this week’s edition of Opossum’s Week in Optimism. Stay tuned for next week’s edition! I have decided to start publishing on Friday instead of Monday because I don’t have the energy to write on Monday. I hope that’s okay, I still plan to publish every week. Thank you for reading.
i miss you.....
I've been counting down the moments from reading Opossum Week in Optimism # 3 for the past two days