The cryptocurrency industry, in general, became a lot more popular in the past couple of years. This saw the development and launch of hundreds, if not thousands, of decentralized applications (dApps) in various fields, such as DeFi, gaming, learning, trading, investing, and whatnot.
There are many reasons for this, including but not limited to the massive bull run in 2021, the rise of non-fungible tokens, the popularity of memecoins, and more. This saw hundreds of thousands of users flocking to whatever the next trend may be.
Unlike previous cycles, however, this time, we also saw regular users take advantage of on-chain availabilities and interact with various dApps such as Uniswap, OpenSea, and so forth. And while this had a massively beneficial effect on the industry’s growth and valuation, it also highlighted some very critical issues.
Blockchains like Ethereum – where the lion’s share of dApp activity takes place – struggled in terms of affordability, scalability, and even accessibility. Layer one alternatives like Solana also proved to be insufficiently effective in handling the massive load of user requests.
This brought up a topic that’s been largely discussed in the cryptocurrency community for years – scalability. Now that scaling solutions became essentially imperative for the future growth of the industry, projects like Optimism saw the light of day.
Being one of the most popular Ethereum scaling solutions, Optimism aims to solve some of the underlying issues with the network with a particular focus on scaling.
Quick Facts About Optimism
Optimism’s mainnet went live on December 2021
Optimism launched its native token (OP) on May 31st, 2022.
A total of 231,000 addresses were eligible to claim 214 million OP tokens.
