Liam Horne

Optimism

I’m incredibly excited to share that I’m joining Optimism to help Karl, Jing, Ben, and the world-class team they’ve built around them build and deploy production-ready optimistic rollups.

Ethereum’s Culture

When I decided to begin working on Ethereum, what motivated me most was its founding philosophies that invited anyone to build on top and to contribute to the development of the community and protocol. Instead of deterring new ideas or approaches, the Ethereum ecosystem welcomed them with eyes and ears wide open. Vitalik himself has been excellent at reinforcing this culture, making Ethereum not just a technology, but a community.

From my perspective, it’s precisely because of this culture that ethereum has been so successful. Tens of thousands of developers around the world have experimented with building and deploying decentralized applications on top of it; hundreds of researchers have built academic careers exploring and expanding on its foundational ideas; and hundreds of companies have been built relying on it as part of their business model.

This culture is also what inspired my friends and I to start ETHGlobal. Working on Ethereum felt an awful lot like being a part of a hackathon community like the one we started in college: Hack the North. There, thousands of ambitious students built all kinds of interesting projects without limitations; whatever they wanted. Developers didn’t just build projects though, they also built tightknit relationships which flourished throughout their careers. Building relationships was just as important as building applications.

Within Ethereum, many of the best projects and ideas are created by aggressive and rapid experimentation. The annual Devcon conferences, research workshops, and hackathons all embody Ethereum’s culture of open innovation and acclerate the pace at which new ideas get tested and reach maturity.

Layer 2

Today, Ethereum is not only the most used crypto protocol by fees, but out of the 15 most used crypto projects, 13 of them are built as applications on top of Ethereum. As the market matures and more use cases and ecosystems like decentralized finance, non-fungible tokens, and decentralized internet infrastructure take shape, I expect that we’ll continue to see its usage grow.

The big challenge now is scaling the technology to meet the demand without compromising on its commitment to decentralization, censorship resistance, and security. For myself and some others, this has meant investing heavily in the research & development of layer 2 solutions; strategies for securely moving as much off-chain as possible.

Again, in the spirit of permissionless innovation, the community has approached layer 2 scaling with several different strategies. For myself, that has been primarily on developing state channels: a technique for streamlining transactions amongst parties which frequently interact (e.g., torrenting peers). Together with the Magmo team within Consensys R&D and support from the Ethereum Foundation, we have pushed state channels towards production.

Along the way however, there have been many experiments with various combinations and flavours of “Plasma”, new pathways to scaling with zK-SNARKs, and more recently, clear pathways to production with optimistic rollups. Unfortunately, despite all of this work, the gas costs have remained prohibitively high with a single asset swap costing over $50 on average.

It seems to me that in the long-term many of these techniques are going to complement each other. For example, in a world where we transition to having multiple rollups or even shards, enabling fast access to liquidity between them will likely require channels and hubs. Towards this, I’ll continue to be giving strategic advice to the State Channels project.

Optimism

Having collaborated on researching these layer 2 strategies alongside Optimism’s Co-Founders Ben, Karl, and Jing over the years, the thing that I’ve admired most about their approach has always been staying true to Ethereum’s founding philosophies. It has been extremely clear since first meeting them that they want to see the community as a whole succeed.

And they make that a priority. Optimism was even founded as a public benefit corporation. I believe this commitment to core community values will lead Optimism to success, just as those same values have helped Ethereum thrive.

More than that though, it’s Karl, Ben, and Jing’s commitment to delivering a working solution now that has really impressed me. For example, Synthetix began building on Optimism in October and is today on a limited mainnet release.

Instead of building one of these scaling solutions in the abstract, the Optimistic Virtual Machine is designed to work right now, with the same source code, developer tools, and user experience that developers and users of Ethereum already expect. And the team working on the protocol, infrastructure, and the community are some of best in the industry.

The road ahead for Optimism is going to be incredibly exciting. As projects begin migrating to Optimism, I can’t wait to see how the community will take advantage of what’s now possible. Between lowering gas fees, normalizing cross-chain swaps, experimenting with protocol modifications, and building more infrastructure around miner-extractable value, there is so much exciting work that Optimism enables.

The mainnet release is going to be a huge stress test for the team and the technology, but it’s a journey that I couldn’t be more excited to be a part of.