The Optimistic Virtual Machine (OVM) is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), which means Ethereum developers can migrate existing smart contracts without breaking them.
Alchemy has announced it will support the scaling project Optimism, which will launch its mainnet in July.
Transaction costs have been a major challenge for users of Ethereum. This led to a search for side-chain solutions. Polygon and zkSync projects were beneficiaries of that search garnering increased funds in the process. Interestingly, Optimism also benefited from that search, raising up to $25 million in February.
Alchemy provides support for the Ethereum system and reportedly powers 70% of Ethereum’s top applications and more than $30 billion on-chain transactions. The firm had earlier in March announced a related partnership with Dapper Labs’ Flow blockchain and another in May with Offchain Labs’ Arbitrum. Alchemy works with Aave, Dapper, OpenSea, and several others.
The rollup technology will help scale Ethereum applications by allowing transactions on the side chain. This can then be moved to the main net in the future following an aggregation. By ensuring greater throughput, lowering latency and reducing costs, the network will help Ethereum developers reach new heights.
Optimism as an optimistic rollup publishes state changes with marginal review and fraud-checking to allow for more speed. However, it relies on users to flag fraudulent updates on the protocol. This will lead to the punishment of the actors and the roll-back of the updates. The Optimism-Alchemy partnership significantly reduces the entry barriers into the ecosystem by meeting a plethora of developers where they already are, making tech adoption easier.
The Optimistic Virtual Machine (OVM) is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), which means Ethereum developers can migrate existing smart contracts without breaking them.
By using optimism rollups, it will cost 35 times lesser to use the layer 2 solution than to use Ethereum directly. Yet, this is not even Optimism’s unique selling point. When questioned about the uniqueness of Optimism, Alchemy’s Product Manager, Michael Garland stated the USP was in the mechanism with which Optimism resolves fraud quickly. Garland further stated that Optimism would not be the last layer 2 Alchemy provides support even as they continue to look for better ways to improve the Ethereum ecosystem.