Share this article
BTC
$83,367.72
-
0.30%ETH
$1,806.79
-
0.16%USDT
$0.9999
+
0.03%XRP
$2.1378
+
0.89%BNB
$590.97
-
0.82%SOL
$120.09
-
0.52%USDC
$1.0002
+
0.03%DOGE
$0.1679
-
0.86%ADA
$0.6468
-
1.64%TRX
$0.2361
-
0.70%LEO
$9.1482
-
0.35%LINK
$12.77
-
0.66%TON
$3.2346
-
2.41%XLM
$0.2524
-
2.31%SHIB
$0.0₄1227
-
0.27%AVAX
$17.41
-
3.93%SUI
$2.1967
-
1.83%HBAR
$0.1607
-
1.35%LTC
$82.40
-
2.48%OM
$6.2377
-
0.37%Sign Up
- Back to menuNews
- Back to menuPrices
- Back to menuResearch
- Back to menuConsensus
- Back to menuSponsored
- Back to menu
- Back to menu
- Back to menuResearch
- Back to menuWebinars & Events
- Back to menu
Andreessen Horowitz Leads $25M Round in Ethereum Scaling Solution
The titan of Silicon Valley VC is leading a major round in Optimism.
Ethereum scaling solution Optimism will launch its mainnet this coming month after announcing a major investment from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) that closed in November.
STORY CONTINUES BELOW
"We've spent a great deal of time looking at various approaches and teams building Layer 2s, and today we're thrilled to announce we are leading a $25 million Series A investment in Optimism," a16z's Chris Dixon and Arianna Simpson wrote Wednesday. "Optimism's exceptional team, carefully designed developer experience, major scaling benefits, years of research and testing, and full composability made it the obvious choice."
Optimism is among a small cohort of firms looking to boost Ethereum's famously choked throughput. The startup was initially planning on rolling out a testnet in March, although decentralized finance (DeFi) exchange Synthetix already began on-boarding the tech stack in January.
"As a result of being able to hire this kind of talent, we will be launching arbitrary contract deployment on mainnet in March instead of public testnet," Optimism said in blog post Wednesday. The startup added seven new members to the team as well, including talent from Coinbase, Handshake and Casa.
Read more: Optimism ‘Soft Launches’ Ethereum Throughput Solution With DeFi’s Synthetix
Earlier today, DeFi venue dYdX announced it was building on StarkWare's ZK-Rollups, a competing solution for boosting the number of transactions a blockchain can handle.
Optimism did not return a request for comment by press time.
Update (Feb. 24, 23:45 UTC): Adds information on Optimism's mainnet launch and the purpose of the funding round.
Zack Seward
Zack Seward is CoinDesk’s contributing editor-at-large. Up until July 2022, he served as CoinDesk’s deputy editor-in-chief. Prior to joining CoinDesk in November 2018, he was the editor-in-chief of Technical.ly, a news site focused on local tech communities on the U.S. East Coast. Before that, Seward worked as a reporter covering business and technology for a pair of NPR member stations, WHYY in Philadelphia and WXXI in Rochester, New York. Seward originally hails from San Francisco and went to college at the University of Chicago. He worked at the PBS NewsHour in Washington, D.C., before attending Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism.
