Optimism's 3-Year Innovation: From Plasma to Optimistic Rollup

In May 2022, research firm Messari released an in-depth report analyzing Optimism, valuing the project at $9 billion. The successive investments from top-tier VCs like Paradigm and a16z, along with the announcement of the OP token airdrop, reignited Optimism as a hot topic in the crypto market. In fact, the emergence of Optimism is not just a simple success story of a single project. It marks a historic turning point demonstrating how a small group of “Ethereum enthusiasts” persisted for five years, overcoming technical barriers in the face of the enormous challenge of solving Ethereum scalability issues.

The Rise of Plasma and the First Trial Faced by Optimism

In mid-2017, the paper “Plasma: Scalable Autonomous Smart Contracts” jointly published by Vitalik Buterin and Joseph Poon drew attention as a new technology to address Ethereum’s scalability crisis. At that time, the surge in transaction volume on the Ethereum network, driven by popular games like CryptoKitties, caused users to wait over 10 minutes and endure high gas fees.

Inspired by this paper, three Ethereum developers founded the non-profit research group Plasma Group. Karl Floersch, an OG developer from the Ethereum Foundation known for his optimistic energy, Jinglan Wang, who started her crypto journey with Bitcoin at MIT and gained experience at Nasdaq and various blockchain projects, and Ben Jones, an early Ethereum developer and artist known as “Weird ETH Yankovic” for creating parody songs about Ethereum.

In 2019, Plasma Group launched a testnet, and initial results were promising. The Plasma architecture theoretically offered unlimited scalability. However, with the advent of DeFi Summer and explosive growth of Uniswap, the situation reversed. The key question Vitalik posed to the team was, “Can it run Uniswap?”

The problem lay in Plasma’s child chain architecture. Withdrawals from L2 to L1 took over a week, making it impossible for general-purpose smart contracts like Uniswap to operate effectively. Despite numerous attempts by Ben’s technical team, this issue remained unresolved. As a result, Plasma, once considered the ultimate solution for Ethereum scalability, found itself at a technical dead end.

Finding a Breakthrough in Past Ideas: The Birth of Optimistic Rollup

When the team was at a standstill, Karl discovered a concept called “Shadow Chain” in a paper Vitalik published in 2014. This involved creating a shadow copy of Ethereum. The team realized this idea could be applied to their Plasma plans, leading to the development of the Optimistic model.

Optimistic Rollup evolved from Plasma’s design, introducing the EVM-compatible virtual machine OVM, which supported nearly all smart contracts executable on Ethereum. This represented a counterintuitive choice—sacrificing some infinite scalability for maximum practicality.

This time, the answer was clear: it could run Uniswap. To verify this, the team collaborated with Hayden Adams to create a demo DEX called Unipig based on Optimistic Rollup, which was showcased at the Ethereum Devcon conference. This moment was more than just a technical demonstration; it was a historic signal that Optimism was becoming a reality.

Capital Attention and the Official Launch of Optimism

The successful demo at Devcon captured the attention not only of the Ethereum developer community but also of investors. In January 2020, Plasma Group raised $3.5 million from Paradigm and IDEO. Transitioning from a non-profit research organization to a for-profit startup, they officially launched Optimism.

Subsequent progress was rapid and systematic. A month later, the OVM alpha testnet was released, followed by the mainnet soft launch in early 2021, with strong support from major protocols like Uniswap, Compound, and Synthetix. After the mainnet’s full launch in summer 2021, Optimism became the first ecosystem besides Ethereum to launch Uniswap V3.

The Philosophy of Optimism: Extending Ethereum, Not Replacing It

The core characteristic of Optimism is its relationship with Ethereum. It aims to become Ethereum itself, not create a new blockchain—this philosophy is encapsulated in “Optimistic Ethereum.” This concept drove EVM equivalence upgrades, providing developers with a “one-click deployment” and “instant execution” environment.

With the Bedrock upgrade, they plan to introduce Fault Proofs (Cannon) to reduce the difference between Optimism and the upper Geth client to just 300 lines of code. An anecdote about Mark camping on the office rooftop to ensure testnet stability illustrates how dedicated the team was to achieving this goal.

Continued Investor Confidence and the Ecosystem Explosion of Optimism

Investor trust remained strong. In February 2025, a16z led a $25 million Series A funding round, and in March 2026, a $165 million Series B at a $1.65 billion valuation. Currently, Optimism has about 40 core team members, including EIP signers, product engineers, and protocol guides.

Since fully opening the ecosystem after removing whitelist restrictions at the end of 2021, Optimism has experienced remarkable growth:

• Over 50 applications deployed
• More than 60,000 ETH bridged on Ethereum mainnet
• Total value on-chain exceeding $900 million
• Transaction fees reduced by over 40%

According to official Optimism data, during just over a year of mainnet operation, users saved over $1.1 billion in gas fees, deployed more than 6,800 smart contracts, attracted over 300,000 unique addresses, and processed over $17.4 billion in transaction volume.

The Era of the Optimism Collective Begins

Recently, the introduction of the new governance mechanism, Optimism Collective, and the OP token airdrop have gone beyond mere technical upgrades, raising fundamental questions about the governance of crypto assets. This signifies that the Ethereum scalability ecosystem has evolved from a technical maturity stage into a community-based autonomous structure.

The idea conceived by three developers on a whiteboard, refined through five years of technical trial and error and capital trust, has grown into a $90 billion project. The success of Optimism is not just a startup success story; it exemplifies how blockchain technology can systematically address infrastructure-level scalability issues and how open community collaboration can accelerate technological innovation. Optimism’s progress is opening a new chapter for the entire Ethereum ecosystem, marking another significant moment in crypto history.