VC Giant a16z Unveils New Rollup Client for Optimism Called Magi

On April 19, the VC giant announced Magi, a new rollup client for the Ethereum layer-2 ecosystem, Optimism.

It stated that client diversity is important for Ethereum, and it is critically important for layer-2 and rollups.

“Multiple independent client implementations can help ensure the safety and liveliness of the network,” the firm noted.

Magi is an OP Stack rollup client written in the Rust programming language.

The software acts as the consensus client feeding new blocks to the execution client in order to advance the chain.

A16z’s motivations behind the release were to advance client diversity in the rapidly expanding layer-2 ecosystem.

The firm said that there was one rollup client implementation at the moment; op-node. Magi will be an independently developed, drop-in replacement for op-node, adding to the rollup’s client diversity, it said before adding:

“We hope that building out this new, Rust-based client will encourage greater safety and liveliness throughout the OP Stack, and bring more contributors into the ecosystem.”

Optimism is the second most popular Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution behind Arbitrum. According to L2beat, it has a total value locked of $2.09 billion which is currently an all-time high.

Furthermore, TVL on the network has increased by 83% since the beginning of the year. The EVM-compatible Optimistic Rollup chain has a layer-2 market share of 21%. Its native OP token has retreated 6.8% on the day to trade at $2.50 at the time of writing.

Arbitrum One is the L2 market leader with a share of 66% from a TVL of $6.58 billion.

TVL for the entire L2 ecosystem is just below $10 billion and cooling from an all-time high this week as crypto markets correct.

Crypto Markets Retreat

Crypto markets commenced their long-overdue correction during the Thursday morning Asian trading session. As a result, total market capitalization had declined by 5% to $1.26 trillion, according to CoinGecko.

Bitcoin had been beaten by resistance at $30K, falling 4.5% to $28,857 at the time of writing. Solid support for BTC lies just above the $28,000 price zone.

Ethereum had taken a larger 6.7% hit in a slide to $1,949 and many of the rest of the altcoins were deeper in the red.