Optimism, a layer 2 blockchain solution, has raised $150 million in a Series B funding round co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Paradigm, bringing the startup's valuation at $1.65 billion, TechCrunch reports. Optimism CEO Jinglan Wang says the project is not only making money, but also giving all of that revenue back towards funding public goods on Ethereum.
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Wang added:
"We do not just want to say that we want to be decentralized, we also want to show the community that we are setting up our own incentives to be compatible with that."
With the latest funding round, the startup wants to speed up with reducing the complexity of its codebase and promoting close compatibility. Particularly, the startup is going to release Bedrock, an EVM-equivalence which is expected to reduce costs on the network substantially.
In February, the developers of Optimism fixed a critical vulnerability that was discovered by programmer Jay Freeman in the code of a fork of the Geth client. According to Freeman, the vulnerability allowed the creation of ETH in the protocol by repeatedly triggering the SELFDESTRUCT function.
The Optimism team was informed about the vulnerability by Freeman on February 2. Thanks to the discovery, he received $2,000,042, the maximum reward under the protocol's bounty program.
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