Token Backing Ethereum Scaling Solution Optimism Rallies 20%

The price of the Optimism (OP) token has surged by more than 80% in a single week to hit a high of $2.22 on Thursday morning, according to data from CoinMarketCap.

Despite OP backtracking to $1.99 by press time, the token is still up an impressive 20.27% over the past 24 hours, massively outperforming the rest of the crypto market.

Optimism’s latest price action follows a series of developments surrounding the Ethereum layer-2 scaling protocol, which uses a technology known as rollups to speed up Ethereum’s transactions and reduce their costs

Earlier this week, OP Labs, the company behind the Optimism protocol, revealed that its planned Bedrock upgrade is about to arrive as early as Q4 2022, “and when it does it will change the rollup game forever.”

The Bedrock upgrade was first announced in May this year, and is described as “the cheapest, fastest, and most advanced rollup architecture” that ever existed.

It promises a four-fold reduction in the time of deposits from layer 1 to layer 2—quite a significant achievement, if realized, given it can take up to seven days for the current Optimistic design to settle the dispute period within the validity of a transaction can be challenged.

Other improvements in the pipeline include optimized code that will allow nodes to sync 50 times faster, a 20% cut in the cost of data submission to layer 1 by roughly 20%, as well as support for several alternative proof systems, including the rival architecture called ZK-rollups.

What else on the plate for Optimism?

Last week, OP Labs also introduced its Drippie transaction system, “an Ethereum-native, trust-minimized conditional transaction mechanism” that aims to address the automation issues associated with on-chain activities.

According to OP Labs, “Drippie is basically an Ethereum-native version of If This Then That (IFTTT), a programmable Web2 service that can combine various triggers ('Kelvin sent a tweet') with actions ('email me the tweet')."

In other words, the system lets users conduct transactions when certain conditions are met, enhancing the efficiency of the blockchain.

On the DeFi side of things, the Optimism network last week received additional Bitcoin support as the team at zeroDAO launched a native BTC to renBTC bridge on Optimism, with more ways to grow the ecosystem of bridged assets potentially coming in the future.

Last week also marked the launch of a new Optimism onboarding flow that lets both new and experienced users go through a step-by-step tutorial and mint a free NFT from the Optimistic Explorer collection after they complete the quest.