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By Linas Kmieliauskas
Source: iStock/Ivan-balvan
After ignoring requests to comment on their progress by Cryptonews.com, the team behind Ethereum (ETH) scaling solution, Optimism, finally confirmed that the network's mainnet public launch is not happening in March. Their new "rough estimate" for the launch is now July.
"The expedited timeline took most projects by surprise and we did not give ample notice for our community to prepare for launch. ... In our excitement, we only considered our own needs and failed to consider our partners’ timelines & requirements," the developers said today, adding that they're postponing the launch in favor of a more coordinated community launch.
According to them, an uncoordinated rush into Layer 2 without enough community preparation is dangerous and there's a risk that popular decentralized apps might get forked and launched by adversaries with the intention of defrauding users.
"Our goal is to make sure that foundational projects, infrastructure providers, block explorers, wallets, and token bridges have time to integrate, audit and test," the team said, adding that their main heuristic for opening mainnet to the broader public is "stability and ecosystem readiness."
Layer 1 (L1) is the base protocol (the Ethereum blockchain), while Layer 2 (L2) is any protocol built on top of Ethereum.
As reported, Optimism is an L2 scaling solution, which allows for the Ethereum mainnet to be 'unburdened' from the great number of transactions it has to process. It uses optimistic rollups to achieve lower fees and latency, as well as greater throughput compared to Ethereum L1 alone. The team behind Optimism was funded by venture firm a16z (Andreessen Horowitz) back in November - a round that enabled the latest Optimism hires and with them, expedited timeline.
a16z described Optimism as "an extension of Ethereum, [with] adherence to Ethereum development paradigms, [which] results in a very easy transition for developers, wallets and users."
At the time of writing (05:12 UTC), ETH trades at USD 1,624 and is up by almost 3% in a day, trimming its weekly losses to less than 9%. The price is up by almost 4% in a month and 1,091% in a year.
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