Optimism’s $25 million Series A round was previously headed by A16z.
At a $1.65 billion valuation, Ethereum scaling solution Optimism has raised $150 million in a Series B investment round led by notable crypto investors Paradigm and Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). According to a Medium post from the company, the money would primarily be used for employment.
As non-fungible tokens (NFT) and decentralised finance (DeFi) applications become more popular, Ethereum demand continues to rise, slowing transaction times and driving up gas, or transaction, prices.
Optimism is a layer 2 scaling solution based on the Ethereum blockchain that uses optimistic rollups as a transaction execution technique to increase throughput and minimise transaction costs while keeping the underlying blockchain’s security features.
According to DeFi Llama data, Optimism has around $363 million in total value locked (TVL) on the platform.
Last year, A16z led Optimism’s $25 million Series A investment. At the time, Optimism’s “excellent staff, meticulously planned developer experience, substantial scalability benefits, years of research and testing, and full composability” were lauded by partners Chris Dixon and Arianna Simpson.
Last summer, a16z announced the $2.2 billion fund that was then the largest in the crypto industry’s history. With the creation of its own $2.5 billion fund in November, Paradigm surpassed the milestone.
Disclaimer: These are the writer’s opinions and should not be considered investment advice. Readers should do their own research.
