Ethereum ‘Superchain’ Optimism have unveiled their 2024 roadmap, featuring several blockchain technology innovations which they hope will transform not just Ethereum, but the web3 landscape at large.
Ran by former Managing Director of YouTube Gaming, and former President of Polygon Labs, Ryan Wyatt, Optimism is – in their words – a “collective of companies, communities, and citizens working together to reward public goods and build a sustainable future for Ethereum.”
Optimism is centred around its EVM-compatible Superchain, a unified network of blockchains that allow developers to deploy their own L2’s and apps at speed, all run using the open-source OP Stack.
Why should I care about Optimism?
Optimism’s mission is to bring equitability, trust and transparency to the blockchain space – and to reward those that follow that path.
Ran by a community-led governance system, members of the Optimism Collection build projects in harmony with one another, and shared the benefits of doing so between the group. With a two-house democratic system, on-chain voting and their innovative Retroactive Public Goods Funding initiative, Optimism looks to reward those that create positive impact.
In its most recent June upgrades, Optimism reinforced and updated its main network, allowing for permissionless transaction verification – requiring human input to accept transaction requests from trusted apps only when necessary.
What is in Optimism’s 2024 roadmap?
One of the first items in Optimism’s 2024 roadmap is the Superchain Registry, allowing developers to see its participants, the config and code of each participating blockchain, and what chains they can built on – including any modifications that particular chain has.
Next, Optimism aims to improve its governance through the adoption of Blockspace Charters. These will help to specify which chains are governed by the Optimism Collective, the criteria they have to adhere to, and the current state of their upgrades – along with how this all works in practice.
Following that comes one of the biggest improvements for end-users – a change to interoperability that will mean users never have to manually switch between networks in-wallet or in-app, helping the blockchain space feel like one united chain, rather than hundreds of disparate, separate entities.
Their 2024 roadmap ends with their Stage 1.5 release – their biggest step yet towards the removal of human backup, which will come in Stage 2. Proposed by Ethereum Co-founder Vitalik Buterin, Stage 1.5 aims to allow more rollups and transactions to be adjudicated by code – open-source and written in Rust – rather than humans.
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