Liam Horne

OP Labs

I’m proud to share today that I’m becoming CEO of OP Labs (previously known as Optimism PBC) to continue the journey of scaling Ethereum by building the Optimism protocol and driving the evolution of the Ethereum protocol and ecosystem for a rollup-centric future.

Parallel Tracks

Jing, who has given me this opportunity has taught me a lot about building teams and aggressively working towards a shared vision. I deeply believe that her and Ben are going to build a remarkable organization with the Optimism Foundation, and I can’t wait to see how having such relentless founders at the helm of a foundation at its inception will play out.

Optimism is meant to scale Ethereum’s technology and its values. By specifying and building optimistic rollups today and driving the adoption of Optimism Mainnet we’re scaling the technology. By introducing retroactive public goods funding and launching broader governance over the network, we’re scaling its values. My hope is that with this split of responsibilities between OP Labs and the Optimism Foundation, we’ll be able to achieve both of these goals in parallel.

Ethereum’s Product

Just over a year ago I wrote about why I joined Optimism and all of the reasons I had then remain just as true today. What has become most clear to me over the last year, however, is how crucial it is for us to scale the Ethereum product.

Ethereum, like Bitcoin, is a decentralized technology and protocol. Making major modifications to the protocol takes time and requires a consensus amongst a large group of people scattered all over the world. It is precisely because of its dedication to creating a decentralized ecosystem that it has been able to sustain multiple bull and bear markets, rebound from significant attacks on the network, and remain dominant despite well-funded “ethereum killers” trying to take its crown.

However, the downside of this is that it is harder for Ethereum to ship at the pace of well-run business. Things which could take only a few days in the context of a more centralized blockchain can take weeks or months in the Ethereum community. Sometimes, this is a good thing but on other occasions, it is preventing Ethereum to meet its potential.

It’s clear to me that Optimism is Ethereum’s opportunity to scale its product.

At OP Labs, already, we have assembled a team of some of the best engineering talent, product leaders, ecosystem builders, community leaders, and legal expertise in the industry, and we’re only at the very beginning of our journey. We’ve shipped the Optimism Mainnet, designed and are building the most minimal rollup abstraction in the industry, and launched the ecosystem with the creation of the OP token and its governance mechanisms.

Together, we can execute on shipping the world-class product that Ethereum users deserve. Everything from engaging with wallet developers to improve the end-user experience, pushing forward improvements to the EVM, and getting danksharding shipped are critical parts of the overall Ethereum product development. It is our mission to dial up the quality of Ethereum’s product development, and we believe that Optimism is the perfect place to do that especially since we’ll have the ability to run experiments in new these new L2 environments.

Building this ecosystem is going to require both the largest scale crypto migration in history and an explosion of new projects. To that end, we’re going to scale our efforts across integrations, partnerships, and marketing to make Optimism the best network in the space for the Ethereum community to migrate to and for the next wave of founders and builders to make their mark.

Moving Forward

Moving forward, we are going to be laser focused on execution. In the immediate future, this means shipping Bedrock and Cannon, growing Optimism Mainnet (by the way, reach out for support launching on Optimism), and stewarding EIP-4844 for the entire rollup community to offer $0.01 gas fees this year.

Further along, we’ll be shipping more and more products for Ethereum users to use Optimism and continuing to evolve our understanding of the ideal system to scale Ethereum; for instance, incorporating lessons learned from hybrid zero-knowledge proof rollup systems to improve the Optimism protocol.

Achieving our vision is going to take a lot of effort, but that’s precisely what makes it fun. :)

If you’re interested in being a part of the journey, please reach out, we’re hiring!