Ethereum postpone Optimism scaling solution to July

The much-anticipated Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solution Optimism has been postponed to at least July.

Optimism was scheduled to be released this week. However, the mainnet has now been pushed forward to at least July, the team disclosed. According to the team behind the upgrade, instead of a rushed effort geared towards lowering transactional fees, they’ll seek a more “collaborative effort” from the Ethereum community. They wrote:

Opening mainnet to the public is not something we can do alone — it will be a collaborative effort between us, projects, and core infrastructure providers like oracles, wallets, nodes & explorers.

That being said, Optimism will not launch until the ecosystem is ready and stable. July is arguably the earliest date that this might happen.

As a backstory, Optimism has been working on an Optimistic Rollup-based Ethereum scaling solution for over a year and a half. As reported by BTC PEERS on several occasions, high gas fees on the Ethereum blockchain are becoming a reason to worry. Optimism is meant to tackle this challenge by increasing the network’s throughput and reducing gas fees.

The solution (the Optimistic Virtual Machine) was deployed earlier this year with decentralized exchange Synthetix. To limit the risk to its platform, Synthetix is integrating the solution in four phases. However, the Optimism team claims that users of the exchange are already enjoying the speed and cost-savings benefits of its solution. And this was what fuelled their decision to quickly rollout Optimism on the mainnet.

We were overeager to give everyone the speed & cost savings that Synthetix users have been enjoying (~$10.1 million saved on fees across 103,775 transactions). In our excitement, we only considered our own needs and failed to consider our partners’ timelines & requirements.

Obviously, the decision was not well thought out, and Ethereum users might have to wait a bit longer for a public launch.

While the rollup on Ethereum mainnet has been postponed, Uniswap has unveiled plans to integrate with Optimism. Early this week the leading decentralized protocol said that following the launch of its version 3 (v3) on May 5, a Layer 2 rollout on Optimism would follow “shortly after.”

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