What is Optimism and What’s in Its Ecosystem?

Optimism is a Layer 2 scaling solution for Ethereum. Like Arbitrum, Optimism is of the Optimistic Rollup faction, designed to speed up Ethereum transactions and cut their ever-increasing gas fees. In this article, we will take you through the basic features and benefits of Optimism and take a tour into its vast, diversified ecosystem.

What is Optimism?

Optimism is built on the idea of Optimistic Rollup which, in short, is an ‘all’s well if no one protests’ approach toward processing and verifying transactions. Optimism rolls up transaction data from the Ethereum main chain, settles them in one bundle, and sends it back to the mainnet for validation. This way, gas fees can be 10 times cheaper than they are on Ethereum.

With its ability to save immense transaction costs - over $1B, according to them - Optimism has had an exponential growth over the past year, boasting over 3,000% growth in daily active users and 60% growth in transaction fees. Optimism’s native token, OP, also soars with such growth, presenting over 200% increase since the crypto market hit its rock bottom last November, miles ahead of many other major cryptocurrencies.

What’s in Optimism’s ecosystem?

Every Ethereum dApp can be deployed on Optimism with minimal modification. This helps curate a burgeoning ecosystem on Optimism, especially in the DeFi section.

Synthetix

Built on Optimism, Synthetix (SNX) is a decentralized exchange (DEX) and a platform for synthetic assets - synths. These synths allow you to expose yourself to various underlying assets without having to hold them. You can trade and exchange these synths and a share of your trading fees will be paid to all SNX - Synthetix’s native token - holders.

Synthetix also has an ecosystem of its own. With sUSD - synth USD, you can even trade spot, options and futures within this ecosystem.

Like OP, SNX has also climbed by almost 200% since last November, demonstrating its vast potential and beating the market in the process.

Velodrome Finance

Velodrome Finance (VELO) is an automated market maker (AMM) designed as the central trading and liquidity marketplace on Optimism Network. Unlike other AMMs, Velodrome rewards liquidity providers with tokens proportional to trading fees, not the amount of liquidity. This can drastically reduce ‘Farm Dumps’ and provide fair compensations for potential impermanent losses.

VELO has also had a great quarter, soaring over 1,000% since last November and still frequents our gainers list till this day.

Stargate Finance

As its name suggests, Stargate Finance (STG) is a fully composable liquidity transport protocol at the heart of Omnichain DeFi, a gateway for cross-chain asset transfer. Other dApps can also integrate Stargate to enable cross chain swaps and asset deployments. Stargate now supports multiple Layer 1 and Layer 2 blockchains including Ethereum, BNB, Avalanche, Polygon, Arbitrum, Fantom, and Optimism.

Like other DeFi protocols, Stargate’s native token STG has also had a good looking quarter with over 200% price increase since last November.

…And there’s more!

As the world’s largest copy trading platform, Bitget is actively expanding the variety of assets in our Spot Market. Now, with our dedicated Optimism Zone, anyone can discover and trade the latest and hottest assets in the Optimism ecosystem and beyond!

Where to find Bitget’s Optimism zone?

You can either access Bitget’s Optimism from our market page by scrolling down and click on ‘Optimism’:

Alternatively, you can access it from our Spot Trading page by clicking on ‘Optimism’ under the AI toggle:

Register now to start your easy, vibrant crypto trading journey at Bitget!