Optimism saves users $1B in fees, raises $150M in Series B

Popular Ethereum scaling solution Optimism has announced a $150 million Series B funding round co-led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and Paradigm at a total valuation of $1.65 billion. According to a blog post from Optimism, the Layer 2 (L2) solution has saved users of the Ethereum network over $1 billion in gas fees. Fees on the Optimism network were reduced by a cumulative 30% last year, and now the team is contributing work towards an Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP-4844) for Shard Blob Transactions, which may potentially reduce Ethereum network fees by up to 100x in the near future. L2 solutions like Optimism, have grown massively in popularity due to the increased demand for NFTs, smart contracts and DeFi applications on the Ethereum network, which in turn congests transaction processing and drives up gas fees. Luckily, Saurik, real name Jay Freeman, discovered one such bug in early February, which would have allowed malicious hackers to create infinite ETH on the network and notified the Optimism team.