Darren Kleine

“The monolithic model doesn&#8217;t work very well,” Anthony Rose opined during a discussion panel that imagined a future with millions of blockchains at Permissionless in Austin, Texas.



The Matter Labs’ senior vice president of technology compared the problem to the Web2 world. “If you want to scale your application [in Web2],” he said, “You can actually spin up more servers. You can distribute the load. This works very well.”



Rose said the concept carries over to <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/web3">Web3</a>. “If I want to spin up an environment to deploy another application, we have this very flexible model where you can essentially just add more hardware and the problem can be solved by scaling horizontally.”



Rose suggested thinking about the model like a “sharded execution environment,” where applications can have “trustless, native, asynchronous communication” between each other.



The multichain model, Rose said, will be the best way to achieve sufficient bandwidth in a high transactions-per-second future where “the world’s financial activities are on-chain.”



Optimism co-founder Ben Jones echoed Rose’s sentiment, arguing that “the things that we see as [<a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/layer-2-2">layer-2s</a>] today — there&#8217;s going to be a lot of them — they&#8217;re going to be able to talk to each other, and they are going to become the new backbone for the internet.”



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">A million was too low, bro</h2>



Jones expects to see collections of layer-2 networks that “look and feel and behave a lot more like one chain,” he said, adding that “chains are the new smart contracts.”



“That&#8217;s how we get from a system of a bunch of chains with unique IDs and their own properties to something that really can serve as a consistent backbone for the internet,” he said.



“Effectively,” Rose said, “you don&#8217;t have to go through [layer-1]. If you wanted to move value between, say, hyperchain A and hyperchain B, or move some arbitrary message [&#8230;] all of the chains as part of this hyperchain ecosystem will be able to communicate natively.”



The vast variety of chains will likely be abstracted away from the user experience, Rose explained, saying a <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/dex">DEX</a> experience that is operating across multiple chains, for example, will feel “just like you’re on the same chain.”



For the average user, the experience would be as abstracted as sending an email, Rose said. “You don&#8217;t have to think about where your friend&#8217;s email is being hosted.”&nbsp;



“This is the vision that we think we have for moving value on these systems.” Jones envisions a future where chains “disappear into the background” as countless chains perform minute tasks.&nbsp;



“For example, a single game session creates a chain for the duration of that game session, and then resolves the results of that game back to some larger game chain.” Jones mentioned the possibility of user-specific chains, where users “bring their state with them” to particular chains for application interactions.



Referring to suggestions of a future that sees a million chains operating in the Ethereum ecosystem, Jones concluded, “I think a million was too low, bro.”



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Chains are the new smart contracts, says Optimism’s Ben Jones

Macauley Peterson

<div id="highlights-block_626c24657504e" class="highlights">
 <ul>
 <li>Governance will eventually be split between two co-equal branches, according to a constitution</li>
 <li>An initial retroactive airdrop will be the first of many seeking to coordinate network participants</li>
 </ul>
 
</div>



Optimism — an Ethereum layer-2 solution featuring optimistic <a href="https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/scaling/layer-2-rollups/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">rollups</a> — is planning to decentralize its governance through the release of a token.



The network detailed the token launch, OP, in <a href="https://optimism.mirror.xyz/gQWKlrDqHzdKPsB1iUnI-cVN3v0NvsWnazK7ajlt1fI" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">a blog post</a> this week. While not the first layer-2 to launch a token, the mechanism of distributing it and the overall governance structure is novel in that it envisions a bicameral system of co-equal “houses”: a “Citizens’ House” and a “Token House.”



“If we just had tokens, then governance rights would be buyable on the open market,” Karl Floersch, chief technology officer, said on the <a href="https://youtu.be/bKVIfJIhS1o" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Bankless podcast</a>.



The plan calls for an “Optimism Collective,” which explicitly aims to prevent the centralization of governance power in the hands of moneyed interests. “It’s more equal,” Floersch said.



Rather than follow a one-token-one-vote structure, the system’s architects at Optimism PBC, a public-benefit corporation rebranded as <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/company/oplabs-pbc/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">OP Labs</a>, sought to create a “balanced, decentralized, bottom-up governance system by the people for the people.”



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/zlPgxN-dVJuNTJVGkWd0KXLuHeXpYPIlIETDCPQxX8MX0rqb2H9VQzrgq0weu_noPb8ZKK_-B5J2Hx5m7rFIe2704-wG50po3a5a0xKkAD4o9kMEdQPKCDea0G2clrf-g_K9R1C8agTq6eZK9w" alt=""/><figcaption>An illustration of the proposed Optimism governance scheme</figcaption></figure>



Layer-2 implementations, built on top of Ethereum’s mainnet, inherit Ethereum’s security but allow transaction throughput to scale, while reducing gas fees — the cost of block space on the network. Optimism is currently the third largest layer-2 by total value locked, at $670 million, behind Arbitrum and dYdX, according to <a href="https://l2beat.com/">L2beat</a>.



Tokens have typically been used to bootstrap liquidity on new protocols, but Optimism received an early boost by being the first layer-2 on which <a href="https://uniswap.org/blog/uniswap-optimism-alpha" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Uniswap announced</a> it would deploy its leading dex protocol. Synthetix, another decentralized finance (DeFi) blue chip, <a href="https://blog.synthetix.io/why-optimism/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">embraced the network</a> as its rollup solution of choice.



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">A new kind of airdrop</h3>



Jinglan Wang, Optimism’s co-founder and CEO, and Ben Jones, formerly the chief scientist, will move to a new Optimism Foundation, which will fund external teams to build out the OP ecosystem.



The OP token is not yet claimable, let alone tradeable on the secondary market, but the team sought to de-emphasize its role.



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">“The token is missing the point of this thing. This is about building a new system of governance and funding mechanisms for public goods,” Jones said.</blockquote>



The problem with Web2 is plutocracy, Wang said. The Optimism team are trying to avoid a “sneaky plutocracy,” enabling Optimism network participants to coordinate without falling prey to the “pressures of centralization.”



To do that, governance power will reside with “citizens” — holders of NFTs that will be distributed by projects built on Optimism. But unlike most NFTs (non-fungible tokens) today, these will be “soul bound,” that is, fixed to a specific address — a single person. They will not be able to be transferred or sold.



While the details remain scant, the team envision a grassroots network, seeding a “web of trust” on-chain that will grow over time. Independent projects will decide which of their community members will best represent their community’s interests in Optimism governance.



The idea has been received favorably among the broader Ethereum community, with co-founder Vitalik Buterin calling it “possibly the biggest attempt at non-token-holder-centric DAO governance so far.”



<figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter wp-block-embed-twitter"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="550" data-dnt="true">Possibly the biggest attempt at non-token-holder-centric DAO governance so far. Excited to see where this goes. 👀 <a href="https://t.co/9vreC7QsXa">https://t.co/9vreC7QsXa</a>&mdash; vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) <a href="https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/1519012381581463552?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 26, 2022</a></blockquote><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
</div></figure>



The initial airdrop was aimed to be “super fair,” with a wide distribution and built-in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Sybil-resistance</a>, by rewarding a set of behaviors that would be difficult to game. But it will only be the first of a string of airdrops used to incentivize activity that helps Optimism, and Ethereum more broadly, grow, by distributing public goods funding to recipients from across Ethereum development.



The team see its governance experiment as a test bed for the future evolution of the entire internet.



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">“Right now we sit at an inflection point…this is a moment where the internet is most sorely in need of human representation, identity, and fixing these problems that we have,” Floersch said.</blockquote>



“Humanity is important, we need to capture and fight for our rights as people and individuals to make sure our networks reflect our values.”



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