No one, I repeat no one...dives as deep as us, and today we are going subnautica level
deep because Ethereum needs to scale, and me thinks there is more than meets the optimistic
eye. Don’t blink, cuz it’s time for Chico Crypto!!
So for those of you who do not know, Ethereum needs help on chain with scaling. Gas prices
during the late summer DeFi bubble got to seriously unsustainable levels, upwards of
10 dollars for just average speed transactions and between 15-20 for a fast one. Since the DeFi hype
has calmed...so has the fees, but they are still brutal...over 1 dollar for a fast transaction.
So how is Ethereum going to scale?? Well there are 3 main groups out there for scaling.
Sidechains, Statechannels & rollups. And since that summer DeFi bubble,
one solution has taken the spotlight, and is what many think is going to save the day for
Ethereum. Its from the rollup group, specifically of the optimistic kind.
And one company, is pulling in the big DeFi names, creating an
optimistic rollup mainnet which they say will help these big DeFi products scale.
That is Optimism PBC from CEO and co-founder Jinglan Wang.
So who is Jinglan & before helping synthetix and Uniswap with scaling
at Optimism PBC, what was she CEO of, and who was she helping scale?
Well she was the CEO and co-founder of the Plasma Group,
and they were helping OMG Network, formerly Omisego scale with more viable plasma.
As we can see from 2019 Omisego Developer updates, they were referencing Plasma Group,
and the work they were doing on coming up with a general purpose plasma chain,
going into the blog they reference, it’s from Plasma Group titled “Towards A General
Purpose Plasma'' and the tldr says “We created a general purpose plasma design
that allows you to build a broad class of smart contracts on plasma. Reach out to learn how”
Now OmiseGo, needed this...they were relying on Plasma Group
to help them solve scaling with Plasma and smart contracts...as we can see from this March 2019
Omisego blog post speaking about what the team has done they said “Among other things they’ve
already contributed to the founding of both the Stanford Center for Blockchain Research
and the Plasma Group, which was founded to create standards and general tools
for plasma development which will benefit the entire ecosystem.
So OmiseGo contributed to the founding of the Plasma Group,
aka helped fund it. So the next question is...what happened to Plasma???
Well January of 2020, something weird happened. As you can see from Plasma Groups own website
still up to this day, there is a blog post with the heading
“Members of Plasma Group have moved on to new beginnings”
And the blog is titled just that “On To New Beginnings”...and it says some very interesting
things...We see Ethereum entering a new chapter, and we’re so proud to have been able to contribute
to that progress. A year ago, scalability research felt like the most pressing need to us,
so we threw everything we had into accelerating it. It is amazing to see the multitude of
competent teams pushing production plasma into reality now. This shift from research
to implementation means that our mission as a research organization must shift as well….
Which was shifting gears to from Plasma group to Optimism PBC and working on
Optimistic Rollups….They didn’t put out a general purpose Plasma chain,
because Plasma wasn’t it….it couldn’t handle the scaling of smart contracts….
But going back to their new beginnings blog...they thank their donors, which include
the ethereum foundation...executive board which includes Vitalik and Aya Myaguchi...OmiseGo, and
matic...which we know is using an adapted version of the plasma tech..but, the OmiseGo thanks
is important…”OmiseGO was among our earliest supporters, financial and moral support. Audits
on the first version of the OMG Plasma Framework, which took inspiration from Plasma Group’s
[work on predicates], are nearly finished. It’s exciting to see our work being used in the wild!
Well how has their work paid off? What has the OMG network achieved? Well the
OMG mainnet launched with much Hype...with even Vitalik Buterin giving them a tweet
of congratulations...which he does not do that for many. Why?
Well he put his faith into them...early supporter, 2017 tweeting about how their token model
is one of his favorites. Which makes sense...as Vitalik was or is...IDK an advisor to them.
Now since this mainnet launch, we got some big scalability news,
USDT tether, could be put on the OMG layer, after a Bitfinex integration...which if you
go to the ETH gas station, that is much needed to this day...Tether is second biggest gas guzzler.
Wait...if Tether is on OMG, which provides scaling, aka uses less gas,
why today is it still the second biggest gas guzzler? Well because no one is using
OMG...going to the mainnet explorer, just 10 transactions, and 5 blocks over the past 24 hours.
And the mainnet has been running since June, over 6 and a half months..only processing under 10
thousand transactions. That tis not good. OMG is a ghost town..
And if you’ve been paying attention lately, OMG network is having a full on breakdown..being
acquired by a hong kong venture firm, former CEO Jun Hasagawa abandoning ship,
terrible vague AMA….in their subreddit daily discussions the past couple days,
people losing faith...criticizing the AMA.
So, now that we have a history of what happened with Plasma,
which was technology for fronted by the Plasma Group, which hasn’t succeeded whatsover...my
question is, why is Ethereum putting faith into that same group again,
just rebranded to Optimism PBC with Jinglan and the Optimistic Rollup?
And a deeper level we go! So As we can see, the late Summer DeFi bubble,
happened mid September...who decided to drop their light at the end of the tunnel,
tesnet plans September 24th...Optimism PBC did..saying the urge to scale is
bigger than ever...Synthetix would be the first to launch and trial the testnet...and
even putting out a roadmap, showing how the steps for mainnet were planned to go and how
the phased testnet with synthetic would go, consisting of 3 phases and a security drill…
Then they say “In parallel, we will be preparing some of our other early adopters for testnet
integrations so that they are ready to deploy once the full testnet is running...and the
early adopter cohort is shown below, Synethtix, Uniswap and Chainlink...3 Massive Ethereum names.
But then, at the bottom something very interesting in the special acknowledgments. They
thank “George Hotz: for saving their arses”
Saving their arses? George Hotz? Well I covered him on Monday,
he is a legendary developer, being the 1st to jailbreak the iphone, and the ps3 online network,
and now he is competing with elon musk in ai and self driving....told you this would come back up.
And CEO Jinglang gives some insights...into the story in a tweet thread. She says they were
working on an EVM to OVM transpiler..they were up against a high pressure deadline?
My question is from who and for what? Well they searched within the solidity community,
and people plates were full...Full enough to not help ethereum scale? That doesn’t make sense…
Well by fate, they met George at a restaurant, and spoke to him about the problem, and George decided
to come and help...which he did do, as we can see from the Pull Request for OVM "Transpilation"
Changes..it is geohot, George, who made the commits and changes in a matter of 4 days.
So back to Jinglan’s tweet regarding the meeting...she doesn’t reference anything
about what this was, a contract payment or anything...is just a really nice tweet thread,
which almost makes it look like George decided to help out of the kindness of
his heart. Well George in October spoke on this...lets listen in to his account “
So let’s listen to what George had to say ....so, they paid him to do it, andddd their original
compiler was a 3000 line mess?? This isn’t making sense, as George doesn’t work with Ethereum,
he probably has played with it...but he is no deep developer, I will tell you that...Now he was able
to fix your mess in a matter of 4 days...and in your blog you said he “saved” your arses…
Well George is gone now. How is the optimistic testnet going?
Well you have to look at the progress of the staged Synthetix testnet!! One day
after Optimism's post September 24th, Synthetic announced that they were already moving into Stage
A, staking on the optimism testnet...bullish...and then less than a month later, mid October
they announced Stage B...bullisher as you had devs tweeting about it, including the
ethernaut...which synthetic retweeted he said “We have successfully migrated/teleported
some $SNX from L1 to Optimism's L2. So far, the subject appears to be completely healthy.
We will continue to monitor it throughout the night. Stay tuned & clem.eth, synthetic engineer
tweeting about it too “L2 phase 2 is out! You can now test L1 to L2 migration on Goerli…
Superbly bullish for the rollup testnet...but
this speed slowed….like way down, it has taken nearly 2 months to move from Stage B to Stage
C...the final stage. December 4th synthetic dropped the blog...showing how to do it….
So based on this, Sytnethix being complete...the roadmap shows
a full testnet & second and third dapp should be integrated already!
Well I’ll tell ya, things aren’t looking that clear...Kain Warwick, founder of Synthetix was
on a call just 3 days before the phase C launch. Let's hear what Kain had to say
Dealbreaker, different path...that doesn’t sound good...let’s continue.
So if you couldn’t tell, they are in the dark about where this is going, they have no freaking
idea, there is no consensus within themselves, and there is none on the outside as there isn’t
another team working with optimism’s layer 2...replay what Justin Synethtix developer said…
No one else is on the L2 with them, so optimism hasn’t started Uniswap,
or Justin would have never said that….
So, I’m not going to make a call on if Optimisim is the way to go,
because it’s not my place. I just bring up the question, that need answered. Like
this one...Remember the Etherenaut...well that is Alejandro Ramos, Synethtix developer,
who was also on that call with Kain, regarding scaling December 1st…
And guess what he tweeted just yesterday...he learned a developer trick
from….Austin Griffith...who loves to build on Xdai...sharing a similar view as me,
calling it Ethereum’s testnet of value. Cheers I’ll see you guys next time