For this week’s episode, Jacquelyn interviewed Optimism’s CEO and co-founder Jing Wang and chief growth officer Ryan Wyatt.

Optimism is an Ethereum-focused layer-2 blockchain that focuses on scaling and speed, while also lowering costs for users. It helps users interact with Ethereum for about 10x cheaper through its blockchain and provides developers the ability to build decentralized applications (dApps) in a faster, scalable way. 

Before taking on this new role at Optimism, Ryan had a little bit of a break but was the president of Polygon Labs (he came on the podcast at the beginning of the year to talk about it) and before that, he was Youtube’s Head of Gaming.

Jing co-founded Optimism in 2018 and before that she founded Plasma Group, a research firm focused on addressing challenges related to scaling Ethereum. She also previously managed blockchain projects at companies like Zcash and Nasdaq.  

We discussed how layer-2 blockchains like Optimism are trying to solve scalability issues on Ethereum and where Jing and Ryan see growth opportunities right now.

We also talked about: 

• Base building with Optimism’s tech 
• Competition between Ethereum and other blockchains 
• Long term adoption 
• Web3 gaming 

Chain Reaction comes out every Thursday at 12:00 p.m. ET, so be sure to subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite pod platform to keep up with the action.

Chain Reaction comes out every Thursday at 12:00 p.m. ET, so be sure to subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite pod platform to keep up with the action.