Key points to remember
- Andreessen Horowitz is launching a new OP Stack stacking client called Magi.
- Magi is written in Rust, unlike OP Labs’ existing client, op-node, which is written in Go.
- The company has acknowledged that Magi is still months away from being a viable alternative to the op-node.
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Venture capital firm a16z aims to diversify Optimism’s rollup clients with its own client.
Magi and Operational Node
Andreessen Horowitz launches a new framework on Optimism.
The venture capital firm announcement today that he released Magi, an OP Stack rollup client written in Rust.
Optimism is a layer 2 solution that aims to help Ethereum increase its throughput capabilities. Instead of processing every Ethereum transaction on the mainnet itself, resulting in blockchain congestion, slow transaction confirmations, and high fees, Optimism offers Ethereum a way to outsource computational data.
OP Stack is the standardized open source development stack that powers Optimism; it is essentially the toolkit that enables the creation of decentralized applications (dApps) on the Layer 2 solution. According to a16z engineer Noah Citron, Magi aims to provide more diversity to cumulative customers of Optimism, the software that allows developers to interact with a blockchain network. So far, only one client exists on Optimism: op-node, maintained by OP Labs and written in the Go programming language.
“Magi aims to be an independent replacement for the operational node, adding to the diversity of rollup customers,” Citron wrote. “We hope that building this new Rust-based client will encourage greater security and liveliness throughout the OP stack, and bring more contributors into the ecosystem.”
Citron indicated that Magi was still in development and would likely take months to become a viable alternative to the op-node. He also said that the development of Magi was done with the help of the OP Labs team.
Disclosure: At the time of writing this article, the author of this article owned BTC, ETH, and several other crypto assets.