Artem Pol

Technical educator at Web3 Foundation.

Previously technical writer on the Nimbus team over at Status.im.

Blockchain consultant, trainer at Bitfalls. Owner of Coinvendor, a place where you can easily buy cryptocurrency.

Audit and develop smart contracts with the Audithor team.

Moonlight at Diffbot.com.

Now Bruno is full time in RMRK.app, Singular.rmrk.app and Kanaria.rmrk.app.

Optimism is an optimistic rollup. When you submit a transaction, the transaction's data is written to the Ethereum mainnet, but the transaction itself is executed by a single computer, the sequencer (instead of thousands of computers as Ethereum does it). This significantly reduces the transaction cost, while a challenge mechanism ensures the sequencer is honest.

The Optimism network lets you send transactions, similar to Ethereum, but with two important advantages, and one feature that stays exactly the same.

Near-instant transaction finality. You know almost immediately if your transaction took place or not.

Much lower transaction fees. Typically between a 1% and 10% of the cost on the Ethereum mainnet (also known as layer 1 or L1). For the current gas price and a few sample transactions' costs see here.

Decentralization: All transactions are posted to L1 Ethereum, inheriting the strong security guarantees of Ethereum.