Optimism x Alchemy: Unleashing developer success

Optimism is solving Ethereum’s scalability problem

As Ethereum scalability mechanisms proliferate, Optimism remains a likely winner in the space. Its ascent as a best-in-class layer 2 scaling solution has brought with it a wave of new apps spanning numerous categories - from DeFi to NFTs - including Optimism-native protocols like Velodrome as well as industry heavyweights like OpenSea and Moonpay.

The Optimism team is laser focused on offering the cheapest, fastest, and most minimal codebase for an Ethereum-equivalent rollup, and spent 2022 relentlessly shipping improvements to its protocol. 

2023 is starting with a bang, with the Optimism Bedrock upgrade slated for completion in Q1. Optimism Bedrock is the culmination of countless hours of R&D with the goal of building the best rollup architecture. It includes net-new powerful features and improvements such as fast peer-to-peer networking, a 75% decrease in deposit time, and smarter sync, sequencing, and state submissions. 

With so much progress to date and even more on the horizon, Optimism is cementing itself as a foundational pillar for developers looking to build and unlock the next generation of use cases across the EVM ecosystem.

The numbers speak for themselves: by the close of 2022, total value locked on Optimism increased by 140% over a 12-month period, topping more than $1 billion USD. And by leveraging Optimistic rollups to drive greater throughput, lower latency, and lower costs, Optimism gas costs are 51 times cheaper than Ethereum gas costs as of December 2022.

Alchemy helped Optimism scale its service when it mattered most

Optimism has exploded in usage and popularity since it was first introduced in 2019. With Optimism’s massive growth came pressing needs to grow in sustainable ways, which is where the partnership with Alchemy proved crucial.

Alchemy and Optimism’s tight collaboration since 2021 has been a major boon for the Optimism community. With a team that's available 24/7, Alchemy helped Optimism scale its service when it mattered most, like during the launch of OP, Optimism’s native token.

During Optimism’s first OP airdrop to users in May 2022, enormous interest in the token materialized into a massive influx of traffic from users looking to claim their OP tokens. 

The enthusiasm for OP tokens unexpectedly overwhelmed Optimism’s internal services, and the Optimism team soon realized they needed 7x the capacity of their public RPC endpoint to accommodate the traffic. The airdrop ended up requiring more capacity than every other app and user on Optimism combined, equating to more than double the global capacity of Optimism.

Less than 10 minutes after being alerted by the Optimism team, Alchemy mobilized 10 engineers to keep Optimism’s overstrained public endpoint operational. 

Though new nodes can take up to 26 hours to start up and sync the chain’s state, Alchemy engineers immediately increased Optimism’s global network read capacity by 700% to support Optimism’s incredible market demand. 

Alchemy’s rapid response rate and seamless communication with Optimism ensured the OP airdrop could complete as planned. At the end of an eventful day, with the backing of Alchemy’s team and resources, Optimism delivered what was promised to its devoted community.

Developers are the biggest winners from the Alchemy and Optimism partnership

It’s no surprise that the biggest beneficiaries of Optimism and Alchemy’s close partnership have been developers. To start, Alchemy began powering Optimism’s public endpoint in April 2022 and has processed billions upon billions of API requests on Optimism to date. On-chain development activity on Optimism has also seen stunning growth on Alchemy’s platform: both year-over-year growth in active developer teams and API usage exceed 1000%.

This growth is due to Alchemy's comprehensive support, including infrastructure and platform tools, as well as continued tight collaboration to quickly resolve network-level incidents. Not only does this make it easier for Optimism developers to build with Alchemy's tools, it also ensures the productivity and efficiency of the entire Optimism ecosystem through Alchemy's support and alert system.

“With Optimism growing so quickly, we're fully reassured that Alchemy's reliable infrastructure will allow us to scale with the increasing demand.”

Alchemy also offers abstracted APIs and tools that Optimism developers can leverage for the specific use cases they’re building for. For instance, the NFT API became available on Optimism in August 2022, offering Optimism developers best-in-class features like spam detection, webhooks to track any transfer, and metadata retrieval up to 17x faster than competitor platforms. And continued investment is not slowing down - in January 2023, Alchemy began supporting historical NFT sales data on Optimism, starting with Opensea’s massive NFT marketplace.

"Alchemy supporting Optimism helps Gelato create the best user experience possible, enabling developers to achieve greater scalability and performance."                                

It’s never been easier to start building on Optimism

Developers can get started with blockchain development on Optimism by deploying a smart contract to the Optimism network via the Optimism public endpoint in just a few steps. 

However, rate limits to the public endpoint puts a ceiling on the scale developers can achieve. 

Instead, with Alchemy’s expansive free tier, it’s never been simpler for Optimism developers to start building with ease, reliability, and a host of powerful, free features. Alchemy’s free tier offers a long, cost-free runway for developers to get their apps off the ground.

Create a free Alchemy account and start building on Optimism today.