Buying Optimism is Easy

Why buy Optimism?

If you are considering buying Optimism (OP), Ethereum’s most widely used Layer 2, take a look at the price of OP, the protocol token! Its blockchain is, as of today, the sixth most used in the crypto world with around 100,000 active users each month and $820 million in value locked within it (TVL).

OP, Optimism’s crypto, is a governance token. This means that it is needed to vote on the most important decisions for the future of the blockchain.

OP was launched with two airdrops through which more than 200 million tokens were distributed to 250,000 early adopters of the protocol. Through the first one, each user who had interacted with the protocol in the previous months received between $3,000 and $30,000 worth of tokens. The price of Optimism (OP) from January to March 2023 rose from a low of $0.90 to a high of $3.20. In the following months, Optimism’s crypto then retraced and returned to the value of about one dollar.

On the net there are some of the most famous dapps of the crypto world such as Uniswap and Curve but also some native DeFi platforms, the most famous being Velodrome, a decentralised exchange. 

So why should you buy Optimism? OP’s price is neither the only variable to consider nor the most important one. If you are deciding whether to buy it, you might also consider the usefulness of its blockchain and, in particular, the problems it solves.

What is Optimism?

Before you decide to buy Optimism (OP) or not, you need to know more than just the price of the token. Optimism is a Layer 2 of Ethereum, a secondary network that relieves the main blockchain allowing its users to perform transactions faster and cheaper. It was founded in 2019 by former members of the Ethereum Foundation, the non-profit organisation dedicated to the development of Ethereum and related technologies.

The name comes from the technology it uses to make Ethereum’s network more scalable, that of optimistic rollups. Through this type of scalability solution, transactions executed on the network are grouped together and sent to the blockchain and placed in a block. This type of operation was devised to solve the main problems of the network created by Vitalik Buterin, which becomes slower and more expensive when congested.

In short, Optimism is one of the solutions that developers have come up with to improve Ethereum’s network, but it is by no means an antagonist to the second most capitalised crypto. If you believe in the ecosystem devised by Vitalik Buterin, you might consider adding Optimism (OP) to your wallet.