Removing whitelist brings Optimism ‘one step closer to truly open, optimistic’ Ethereum

Do you remember the day you took the training wheels off your bicycle? Maybe you liked them well enough, but knew it was time to move on.

Now, an Ethereum rollup – or a Layer 2 solution for scaling transactions – is ready to take the same step.

Glass half full

Optimism, an Ethereum Virtual Machine [EVM] compatible rollup announced that it was getting rid of its whitelist, so that any user could deploy their contracts without waiting to be vetted. Optimism revealed,

“Decentralization is a challenging and ultimately incremental process. Permission-less contract deployment brings us the vision that we have for a truly open, accessible, and ‘optimistic’ Ethereum.”

The official release added,

“The removal of the whitelist also means that we won’t be performing any more regenesis-style updates. All future upgrades will maintain all state, transaction history, and event data.”

Previously, users had to meet some launch requirements, verify the contracts, apply to be whitelisted, and then wait up to two weeks for authorization.

While Optimism admitted that the previous model helped communicate efficiently with builders, it has shared that the “training wheels” are officially gone.

Today is the day. ?

The whitelist is officially gone and anyone can deploy to Optimism!https://t.co/XFCL7yKh8n

— Optimism (@optimismPBC) December 16, 2021

Don’t “white” for me!

According to its official announcement, Optimism is almost a year old. Despite the early birthday news, however, users need to keep an eye on the numbers.

As of press time, while Optimism was one of the top rollups in terms of total value locked [TVL], this has fallen by 8.86% to $377 million in seven days.

Source: l2beat.com

You might be wondering whether there’s an immediate reason for excitement right now. Well, one factor is the fees. According to an Arcane Research report, while transferring ETH can cost about $18.11, the same function costed less than $0.01 with Optimism.

Now, minus the barrier of a whitelist, the possibilities are tempting indeed.

On a roll…but which way?

The prices of top cryptocurrencies have been falling across the board since the 4 December crash. Naturally, other parts of the ecosystem were also impacted.

Arbitrum, a major rollup in the Ethereum ecosystem recorded a TVL of $2.26 billion at press time. However, this came after a drop of 4.63% in the last seven days.

Source: l2beat.com