On June 1, 2022, Optimism officially announced the issuance of token OP and conducted retroactive airdrops. This news has attracted widespread attention, especially for those users who actively participate in the protocol interaction, and may mean that there are still opportunities to obtain more airdrop rewards in the future. This article will introduce in detail some noteworthy projects in the Optimism ecosystem and explore their development potential.
Advantages and Challenges of Optimism
Optimism is currently the only Rollup solution that has achieved "EVM equivalence", which gives it unique advantages in terms of friendliness and migration convenience for Ethereum ecosystem developers. However, due to the recent lifting of whitelist restrictions and the impact of the downward market conditions, Optimism's ecological prosperity is not as prosperous as Arbitrum. Even the TVL of only dYdX project on StarkEx is 30% higher than the total TVL of Optimism.
Despite this, Optimism still completed a $150 million financing led by Paradigm and a16z in March this year at a valuation of $1.65 billion, setting an Ethereum Layer 2 record. Its TVL has also hit a new high recently, showing that its growth is accelerating.
Optimism Featured Projects
Synthetix and its ecological projects
Synthetix is a synthetic asset protocol that officially announced the launch of Optimism in July 2021. According to data from DeFiLlama, of the total TVL on Optimism of slightly more than US$500 million, Synthetix alone has US$225 million, accounting for nearly 45%. In addition to Optimism, the only blockchain currently supported by Synthetix is Ethereum, and its ecological projects such as Kwenta, Lyra, Thales, and dHEDGE have also launched Optimism.
Synthetix is one of the earliest DeFi projects, allowing users to mint the US dollar stable currency sUSD by over-collateralizing its native token SNX, and trade on its market including sETH, sBTC and even precious metals such as gold and silver in the traditional financial market, as well as well-known US stock listed companies. Synthetic assets such as stocks. Last week, Synthetix launched incentives for veCRV holders to vote into Curve’s sUSD-3CRV pool on Optimism to further stimulate liquidity growth.
Synthetix ecological second-layer option protocol Lyra migrated all liquidity to Optimism at the end of last year and became Optimism's native DeFi project, supporting option transactions of ETH, BTC, LINK, and SOL through sUSD; Thales, as a Synthetix ecological derivatives protocol, also It has become the native protocol of Optimism, supporting the purchase of call and put options on more than 10 assets through sUSD; dHEDGE is an asset management protocol based on the native assets of Synthetix. In addition to Ethereum and Optimism, it also supports assets on Polygon.
Pika Protocol
Pika Protocol is Optimism's native decentralized perpetual contract protocol, which supports up to 50 times leverage for perpetual contract transactions of BTC, ETH, LINK, SOL, AVAX, and SNX.
Clipper
Clipper is a DEX launched by cryptocurrency exchange developer Shipyard Software in June 2021. It received US$4 million in equity financing led by Polychain Capital and received an initial US$17 million from Polychain, Nascent, and Three Arrows Capital. fluidity. Clipper reduces the gas fees required for transactions by aggregating liquidity, optimizing AMM, and simplifying on-chain calculations. Currently, in addition to Optimism, Clipper also supports Ethereum, Polygon and Moonbeam.
Rubicon
Rubicon is an order book model DEX. Currently, it is only available on Optimism and will be launched on Polygon in the future. It supports the use of USDC, USDT, and DAI to trade WBTC, WETH, and SNX.
Aelin
Aelin is a decentralized financing protocol built on Ethereum but published on Optimism. Users can post fundraising needs and corresponding uses on it, and other users invest funds to obtain profits. Its operating model is somewhat similar to asset management, but it may carry greater risks because of its high degree of freedom of use.
ZipSwap
ZipSwap is an Optimistic Rollup solution native DEX for the second-tier network, supporting Optimism and Arbitrum.
Polynomial Protocol
Polynomial Protocol is a crypto asset management protocol that allows users to deposit sUSD and sETH, and the protocol generates income through automated strategies.
Cross-chain bridge support
Currently, almost all mainstream cross-chain bridges support Optimism, including Hop, Synapse, Teleportr, Across, Celer Bridge, Connext, LI.FI, LayerSwap, O3 Swap, Optimism Bridge, Orbiter, Poly Network, Via Protocol, Stargate, etc. The author only introduces some of them.
Stargate
Stargate is a stablecoin cross-chain bridge based on the cross-chain interoperability protocol LayerZero, and its TVL exceeded US$4 billion within three weeks of its launch. Its underlying protocol, LayerZero, received US$135 million in investment led by FTX Ventures, Sequoia Capital and a16z at the end of March. In addition, SushiSwap will also be integrated with Stargate in the future.
LI.FI
LI.FI is a cross-chain DEX aggregator that allows users to convert any asset on any chain to any asset on another chain within the scope of its supported chains and assets. The function of Via Protocol above is similar to it, Via Protocol also announced the completion of US$1.2 million in financing at the end of February this year.
LayerSwap
LayerSwap is an application that can reduce handling fees when withdrawing coins from large exchanges including Coinbase, Binance, Bitfinex, FTX, OKX, Kucoin, Huobi, Crypto.com, Kraken, and Bittrex Global to the Ethereum second-layer network.
High TVL DeFi and other track projects
Optimism is a second-layer solution for Ethereum. Currently, the projects with the highest TVL in the ecosystem are generally the top applications on the Ethereum mainnet. According to DeFiLlama data, in addition to the above-mentioned projects, the top 20 TVL projects on Optimism also include Uniswap, Perpetual Protocol, Curve, and AAVE.
Conclusion: The official launch of the Optimism token OP and the retroactive airdrop have undoubtedly brought more attention and expectations to its ecosystem. Although it is currently not as ecologically prosperous as other competitors, its unique technical advantages and accelerating development pace make Optimism an Ethereum Layer 2 solution worth paying attention to. In the future, as more projects are launched and the ecosystem is further improved, Optimism is expected to achieve greater breakthroughs in the DeFi field.