Ethereum’s Optimism Raised $150 Million, Hitting $1.6 Billion Valuation

Ethereum’s Optimism raised $150 million in its latest Series B funding round and reached a $1.6 billion valuation as we can see more today in the latest Ethereum news.

Ethereum’s Optimism scaling solution announced it raised $150 million and the startup added that the cash now means the company has a valuation of $1.65 billion. Optimism is a startup that wants to use Ethereum and make the process cheaper and easier. This is because lots of people are using Ethereum to build things and make transactiosn with the native cryptocurrency Ether.

After over a year on mainnet, our milestones keep adding up: $1B in gas fees saved for users, thousands of smart contracts deployed, three separate forks…

And now: funds raised to the tune of $150M, giving us runway to keep shipping rain or shine.https://t.co/pBC2jmXtnh

— Optimism 🔴✨ (@optimismPBC) March 17, 2022

The Ethereum network is in high demand because of the explosion of DEFI and NFTs which represent ownership over digital items and suffers from high fees but Optimism works to change this:

“We cut fees by over 30% in the last year and continue to push enhancements to the protocol that slash fees even further. Sustainable, sub-dollar transactions are no longer a question of if, but when.”

The top investment firms Andreessen Horowitz and Paradigm led Optimism’s Series B funding round and the former is very focused on investing in crypto but announced that it wanted to plug $4.5 billion in crypto projects. The general partner at Andreessen Horowitz Chris Dixon said:

 “Demand for Ethereum has continued to climb as NFTs, DAOs, DeFi and other types of apps take off, resulting in high gas fees. This is constraining growth, stifling innovation, and pricing out some users”

While the gas fees on ETH have been high, they have been dropping since January and this is down to the NFT market cooling down with less NFT trading means that there’s less demand for the Ethereum network and therefore low fees.

The Ethereum layer-two scaling solutions provider Optimism announces collaboration with Etherscan and in the announcement, the technology provider declared it a huge usability milestone, stating that it makes it highly technical information that will be easily searchable and human-readable. The company provides L2 scaling technology called Optimistic rollups that builds on zero-knowledge proofs but changes the consensus mechanism so that the network assumes that all of them are correct. The intervention is necessary if there’s an incorrect transaction where there’s a case of “fraud-proof.” With the Etherscan integration, Optimistic Ethereum users will be able to monitor the deposits and to withdraw in addition to seeing when L2 transactions are pre-confirmed and when they are posted and finalized in batches.