Wow, 2022 has been a pretty good year, and as we prepare to put it behind us for the new year, we thought we'd take a look back at what happened in Optimism 2022.
In 2022, OP governance was born. In April, we launched the Optimism Collective and shortly after, Token House went live. It's now into the third quarter of iterative governance , and they're definitely growing fast!
RetroPGF 2 will distribute 10 million OP to public goods early next year, an early step in applying the same iterative philosophy to Citizen House. In preparation, we recently released AttestationStation - a permissionless data primitive built for reputation networks.
Speaking of the year, OP Labs shipped steadily and relentlessly. Optimism Bedrock has combined lessons learned from years of running Optimism to create a modular, performant, Ethereum-equivalent codebase built to last: the OP Stack . Bedrock releases are code frozen. On January 12, Optimistic Goerli will be upgraded to the Bedrock version, and the mainnet will follow.
OP Labs also made an important contribution to EIP-4844 , which is an important step forward in Ethereum's rollup-centric roadmap.
Then comes the plethora of projects joining the Optimism ecosystem in 2022, including industry heavyweights such as AAVE and OpenSea, as the Optimism Universe continues to expand — see the numbers below.
So sit back, relax, pour yourself a cup of your favorite hot beverage, and enjoy a look at Phoenix's last year at Optimism.
built for the future
On the protocol side, the focus this year has been on writing a durable Optimistic codebase, and The Collective has been working hard to build the cheapest, fastest, smallest codebase for Ethereum's equivalent of Rollup.
This release, called Bedrock, incorporates countless lessons learned over 2 years in production rollups. Upgrading to Bedrock will enable Optimism to offer the lowest L1 data cost, support multiple execution clients, implement security improvements for bridged assets, and increase throughput.
The Optimism Goerli testnet upgrade to Bedrock will go live on January 12, and shortly thereafter, a mainnet upgrade proposal will be submitted to Token House. If the proposal is successful, the Optimism mainnet could migrate to Bedrock in Q1.
Bedrock is an upgrade to our codebase ( OP Stack ) that lays the foundation for our future vision. In addition to the mainnet itself, it could power a custom, modular blockchain and expand our vision of a self-sustaining cycle of public goods funding .
Another key to the future of Optimism is ensuring we remain at the forefront of scaling Ethereum. Case in point: EIP-4844 , a proposal to implement protodanksharding on the Ethereum mainnet, evolved from an ETHDenver hackathon project into a planned Ethereum upgrade in less than a year. We look forward to helping Ethereum bring 4844 to mainnet by June 2023.
Observation from the data
The numbers don't lie: The City of Optimism is growing steadily in 2022. More people are using Optimism and more dApps are being launched while benefiting from the security of Ethereum. One year after the EVM equivalent upgrade , the number of Optimism transactions increased by more than 10 times. Simply put: there are more people doing more things with the chain.
The total value of assets held by Optimism has also increased substantially, and Optimism’s on-chain value has also nearly doubled by a factor of 10, from 116k ETH($540M) to 995k ETH($1.3B) over the same twelve-month period. The metric itself does not define the health of the chain, but it is part of a larger picture showing the sustainability of the overall ecosystem.
ecosystem
Blockchains are as powerful as their ecosystems, and Optimism's ecosystem also saw strong growth in 2022, with 54 new active (>100 txs/day) dApps deployed throughout.
These deployments run the gamut from DeFi to NFT, and include Optimism-native protocols like Velodrome, as well as stalwarts of industry favorites like AAVE and OpenSea
Here are the top six Optimism dApps for 2022, measured by number of transactions and fees incurred.
government affairs
Yes, developers are developing and users are using, but let's not forget that the community is also managing.
2022 saw the creation of Token House, considered by many to be one of the best designed and most widely distributed AirDrop in cryptocurrency . OP Airdrop #1 launched Optimism Collective and Token House's experiment in digital democratic governance.
On day 1 of the most recent round of voting, 11.7k unique addresses voted for OP . 155,000 wallets currently delegate governance to 22.9 million OP , while governance has approved grants for 55.7 million OP to date.
We are witnessing the birth of an emerging digital nation, and this is happening on-chain in real time .
After more than half a year of implementation, iteration and improvement, Token House is in full swing. The stage is set for Citizen House — House of Tokens.
The first iteration of Citizens' House was recently announced: Q1 2023, with RetroPGF 2 offering 10 million OP to the people and projects that make Optimism possible.
https://twitter.com/optimismFND/status/1600187625649803265?s=20&t=HqjhT7r5icxe8Ey6eEv_TA
goodbye 2022
2022 is a big year for Optimism and we can't wait to see what 2023 holds, the future of Optimism and the Optimism Collective is as bright as ever, so head over to Optimism City , try some of the available dApps , and start interacting with Let's build a parallel digital nation together .
Stay Optimistic and see you next year!
