The launch of the public mainnet for the Ethereum scale solution was delayed until July

It has been announced that Optimism, the Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solution, will delay the launch of its mainnet until at least July 2021. According to the official announcement, the new launch date is uncertain as it still depends on the speed of preparations and “Ecosystem readiness”.

Modified plans for the Optimism mainnet

Prior to this new announcement, the mainnet was scheduled to launch just this week, according to the development team behind Optimism.

“Opening the mainnet to the public is not something we can do alone: ​​it will be a collaborative effort between us, the projects and major infrastructure providers such as oracles, wallets, nodes and explorers. When we launch it, we will do it together as a community ”.

The development of the mainnet has been underway since 2019. It aims to increase the transaction processing capacity of the Ethereum network and reduce gas tariffs. Both will be needed as the network expands and sees more and more users join.

A soft-launch of its Optimistic Virtual Machine (OVM) took place earlier this year in conjunction with Synthetix. This decentralized exchange will integrate this four-step OVM solution on its platform to limit risk exposure.

According to Optimism, this effort has been a success so far, as users have appreciated higher speeds and lower rates. According to their estimate, over $ 10 million in fees were saved on over 103.775 transactions.

Synthetix isn't the only platform that has embraced Optimism in recent times. Uniswap, a popular decentralized trading platform has also done this, and is currently planning to launch a L1 Ethereum mainnet of its version 3 (V3) in May 2021. There are also plans to launch an L2 distribution on Optimism.

The need for rollup

These types of rollups are crucial for blockchain networks, especially community-centric and fast-growing ones like Ethereum. Rollups help networks accommodate more people and work more efficiently. Considering the amount of entry the blockchain and crypto industry has seen in recent months, the ability to process transactions faster and at a lower cost is critical.

Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, also saw them as powerful tools for scaling in the short- and medium-term future, while more work will need to be done in the coming years for the Ethereum ecosystem to mature.

Furthermore, as already mentioned above, this summer there should finally be the launch of ETH 2.0 which should lead the coin (second by market capitalization) to reach new price levels.

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