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OP Token Shoots as VC Giant Andreessen Horowitz Starts Working on New Client for Optimism
On Wednesday, April 19, the crypto wing of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) announced its blockchain infrastructure plan of working on a roll-up client for Optimism (OP) dubbed Magi.
This helped Optimism’s native OP token to recover from the broad market sell-off on early Wednesday. Yesterday, the Optimism (OP) token price jumped all the way to $2.70. As of press time, the OP token was trading 1.27% down at a price of $2.55 and a market cap of $800 million. Most of this rally soon followed the announcement from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z).
The Optimism (OP) token has been one of the leading participants in the broader crypto market bull run of 2023. As of its current price, the OP token is trading at more than 150% gains year-to-date.
Crypto engineer Noran Citron posted the announcement on Wednesday adding Magi is still in the development phase. Citron added that Magi is still months away from being production-ready and thus, it is just an early-stage development.
The a16z project is a new client for the OP Stack which is a standardized and open-source development stack that powers the Optimism platform. The entire system is written using the Rust programming language and will serve as a top alternative to the OP node, which is the only existing roll-up client maintained by OP Labs and written using the Go programming language.
Greater Decentralization for Optimism (OP)
As per the thesis shared by Andreessen Horowitz, more systems will help in offering more robust decentralization for the Optimism platform. The VC giant also believes that the addition of a system based on the Rust programming language will attract more developers.
In broader terms, a client is basically a software application, which will allow the user to interact with the blockchain. Explaining the roll-up client, crypto engineer Citron wrote:
“Magi acts as the consensus client (often called a rollup client in the context of the OP Stack) in the traditional execution/consensus split of Ethereum. It feeds new blocks to the execution client in order to advance the chain. Magi performs the same core functionality as the reference implementation (op-node) and works alongside an execution node (such as op-geth) to sync to any OP Stack chain, including Optimism and Base.”
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OP Token Shoots as VC Giant Andreessen Horowitz Starts Working on New Client for Optimism
