Ep. 704 Exploring Optimism: The Future of Ethereum Layer 2s

Summary

CRYPTO 101 – Episode 704: Exploring Optimism: The Future of Ethereum Layer 2s (Feb 10, 2026)

Hosts: Bryce Paul & Brendan Viehman
Guest: Jing Wang (Founder and CEO, Optimism)

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Episode Overview

This episode focuses on Ethereum’s Layer 2 (L2) scaling ecosystem, with deep insights from Jing Wang, CEO of Optimism. The discussion covers the evolution, purpose, and future role of L2s like Optimism, recent trends, enterprise adoption barriers, the explosion of stablecoins, and how regulatory events like the Clarity Act could unlock the next chapter for the industry. Jing also breaks down optimism’s strategy, the impact of partnerships with giants like Coinbase and innovative super apps, and shares her long-term vision for a scalable, open financial system.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Jing Wang’s Crypto Background and Journey to Optimism

• Early Involvement with Ethereum

  • Jing started as a bitcoiner, discovering Vitalik Buterin through his lucid technical writing.
  • Contracted with Ethereum Foundation in 2017, focusing on crypto economics.

    "I became familiar with Vitalik's work writing for Bitcoin magazine...the clarity of technical writing, the simplicity..." (02:36–03:05)

  • Worked alongside future leaders like Uniswap’s Hayden Adams.

• Genesis of Optimism

  • Early experiments began with "Plasma" scaling, but developer friction was high.

    "The first category of scaling solutions was called plasma... But as we started talking to more developers, we realized this was not an option." (04:15–05:01)

  • Pivoted to "optimistic rollups" for compatibility with existing Ethereum smart contracts.

    "Optimistic rollups...enabled you to take the exact same solidity smart contracts from Ethereum and port them over in essentially a single click." (05:01–05:22)

2. The Mission of Optimism and Layer 2s

• Core Mandate

  • Focus is on "secure, decentralized, scalable computation." While technical requirements (speed, TPS, gas, etc.) evolved, the mission remains constant. (06:14–06:47)

• Ethereum L1 vs. L2: Roles and Trade-offs

  • L1 (mainnet) focuses on censorship-resistance, resilience, and uncompromising decentralization, with higher costs and latency.
  • L2s, like Optimism, can customize environments for specific use cases, trade-offs, and user journeys.

    "Ethereum is for censorship resistance, resilience, decentralization, and it will never compromise on those things... those are the key properties that the Ethereum L1 is optimizing for." (11:30–12:00)

• Custom L2 Chains and Super Apps

  • L2s can tailor blockchains for enterprises or major apps (e.g., Worldchain, Base) at scale, supporting unique features like consistent fees or human-first transaction ordering. (12:45–13:22)

3. Notable Projects and Use Cases Powered by Optimism

• Worldchain:

  • Aims to verify humanity, prevent bots on platforms like Reddit, dating apps, etc.
  • Massive adoption in emerging markets, focusing on small, frequent transactions.

    "World's whole thesis is that verifying that you are truly a human is going to be valuable..." (13:42–14:24)

• Base (Coinbase's L2):

  • Leverages Optimism’s open-source stack and engineers for scaling and clarity.

    "All of the code that the base blockchain uses is written by us with great input from the phenomenal Coinbase engineering team." (31:20–31:39)

• Sony's Sonium:

  • Experimenting with tokenizing intellectual property (IP) via the OP Stack.

4. State of the Layer 2 Market

• Market Share and Throughput

  • Optimism-powered networks handle over 62% of Ethereum’s L2 activity; 14% of all blockchain activity globally.

    "Among all L2s, that's our market share. Among the top 100 blockchains in crypto, I think we're around 14% market share." (16:07–16:15)

• Drivers of Growth

  • Efficiency: "Transactions are incredibly fast and incredibly cheap, usually less than a hundredth of a cent, and they confirm in less than 250 milliseconds." (16:18–16:33)
  • Deep collaboration: "Our internal mantra is to become indistinguishable from someone on their team." (16:54–17:11)

• Leading Verticals

  • Trading remains the primary driver, with interest surging in tokenization and stablecoins.
  • Each chain and partner approaches asset types and arbitrage with unique hypotheses. (18:08–18:49)
  • Trading and lending are projected as the top sectors in 2026.

    "The most important sector...Trading, lending, these are parts of it and a focus for 2026." (19:00–19:54)

5. Institutional Adoption & Infrastructure Expectations

• Why Ethereum Dominates Institutions

  • "Ethereum is incredibly lindy. It's proven itself as a trustworthy Steward of an insane amount of capital." (21:24–21:40)

• Elevating Infrastructure Standards

  • "2025 reset expectations for what ‘production ready infrastructure’ actually means." (22:27)
  • Legacy enterprises require higher levels of compliance (e.g., SOC 2), uptime, and dedication than crypto-native companies. (22:46–23:47)

• On-chain vs. Traditional Finance (TradFi)

  • Crypto’s strengths: Born from first principles, more open and programmable.
  • TradFi’s strengths: Regulatory experience, scaling to tens of millions of active users, more experience with compliance and customer expectations.

    "On chain systems have been built mostly from first principles about how money should move..." (24:00–24:25)

• The Complexity Facing Enterprises

  • Barriers include technical jargon, choice overload, and integrating crypto with existing products.

    "If you ask five different blockchain engineers to define a chain, you get five different answers...there's so much nuance at the protocol level." (26:47–28:13)

  • Optimism’s approach: Embedding with partners from ideation to implementation, helping form the business strategy and then the technology solution. (28:35–29:45)

6. Stablecoins and Cross-Chain Liquidity

• Stablecoin Explosion
  • Stablecoins, deposit tokens, and algorithmic stables have grown rapidly. (33:54–39:33)
  • Key challenge: Fragmented liquidity across chains; bridges (like Across, LayerZero) and OP stack standards improve seamless movement between OP stack chains.
  • Use cases:
    1. Trading pairs — unified liquidity and efficiency
    2. Deposit tokens — earning yield, regulatory variations
    3. Algorithmic stables — higher risk/yield, experimental
  • Goal: Reduce bridging latency to near real-time (from 30 seconds to 4 seconds). (37:21–37:54)

    "One of our goals this year is to bring that 30 second bridging latency between chains to four seconds..." (37:30–37:36)

7. Sentiment and The State of Crypto Markets

• Enterprise Interest vs. Bear Market Reality

  • "You have real enterprise interest, real mainstream interest...yet you also have one of the worst markets in crypto history." (40:48–41:04)
  • More scrutiny on protocol revenue and financials is becoming the norm. (41:56–42:43)
  • Recent volatility and regulation gridlock (Clarity Act, Market Structure Bill) keep much capital on the sidelines.

    “There is so much money and there are so many companies that are sitting on the sidelines who are waiting for this stuff to get passed.” (43:14–43:46)

• Regulatory Outlook

  • Jing expresses hope that the U.S. will set clear, innovation-friendly regulations and highlights optimism's focus on consumer protection as a guiding principle.

    "The United States has a really incredible opportunity here. This is where crypto innovation is happening...the US has an opportunity here to capitalize on by providing really clear regulation." (45:11–46:08)

8. The Road Ahead for Optimism

• Vision of Success

  • "The perfect future is one where finance is coming on chain because we're providing a genuinely better user experience than what the traditional financial system has to offer..." (47:13–48:05)
  • Aiming to free liquidity, lower cost and latency, global accessibility—“your own Swiss bank in your pocket.”
  • Optimism’s focus: Fast, secure, high-throughput scaling and removing capital movement bottlenecks, even if it sounds "boring" to outsiders.

• Call to Action / Final Thoughts

  • Jin encourages partnerships: "Whether you are a growing application... a consulting firm or a bank or a fintech and you want to better understand how to put together your crypto strategy...come talk to us." (50:19–51:39)
  • Find Jing on X: @jinglejamop and optimism at Jobs Optimism IO.

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Notable Quotes & Timestamps

• On L1 vs. L2 Philosophy (Jing):

  "Ethereum is for censorship resistance, resilience, decentralization, and it will never compromise on those things, even if it means the cost is higher..." (11:30)

• On User Experience & Enterprise Needs (Jing):

  "Our internal mantra is to become indistinguishable from someone on their team." (16:54)

• On Market Areas (Brendan):

  "62% market share amongst L2s...what areas are truly contributing the most here?" (15:51)

• On Stablecoins and Scalability (Jing):

  "The more tools you build to reduce the latency, reduce the risk of moving capital, reduce the cost of capital between chains, the more of a surge you see in things like trading activity..." (34:15)

• On the Bull vs. Bear Market Contradiction (Jing):

  "You have real enterprise interest, real mainstream interest... yet you also have one of the worst markets in crypto history." (40:48)

• On Regulatory Readiness (Jing):

  "We try to navigate the ambiguity by thinking first through consumer protection..." (45:11)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 02:36 – Jing’s entry into Ethereum, early days
• 04:15 – Plasma, CryptoKitties, and the birth of optimistic rollups
• 11:30 – Role of Ethereum L1 vs. Layer 2s
• 13:42 – Worldchain and emerging market adoption
• 16:07 – L2 market share, processing volumes
• 18:08 – Trading’s dominance on L2s
• 21:24 – Ethereum’s institutional edge
• 22:27 – Resetting "production ready infrastructure"
• 28:35 – Guiding enterprises through the L2/L1 jungle
• 31:20 – Coinbase’s BASE as OP stack user
• 33:54 – Stablecoin ecosystem explosion
• 37:30 – Roadmap: lowering bridging latency
• 40:48 – Enterprise interest amid bear market; sentiment paradox
• 45:11 – U.S. regulation, Optimism’s proactive stance
• 47:13 – Vision of onchain finance; Optimism’s next goals
• 50:19 – Final call to action, finding Jing & Optimism

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Summary & Takeaways

• Optimism has become one of the two leading Ethereum L2s, focusing on scalable, secure, and customizable environments for both retail and institutional use.
• L1 and L2 serve complementary functions: uncompromising decentralization vs. customizable, fast, and affordable environments.
• Enterprise adoption is accelerating but requires higher levels of compliance and reliability.
• Stablecoins, deposit tokens, and cross-chain liquidity are driving most recent growth and innovation, with ongoing work to reduce transfer and bridging times.
• Despite positive technical and adoption signals, macro sentiment is weighed down by lingering regulatory uncertainty and the aftermath of a major market crash.
• Optimism continues to embed with partners, focusing on scaling, throughput, liquidity, and making onchain finance mainstream and user-friendly.

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For More Information

• Website: Optimism.io
• Careers: Jobs on Optimism
• Social: Jing Wang on X/Twitter @jinglejamop

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This summary provides a comprehensive look at the state and future of Ethereum’s Layer 2 scaling as seen through the lens of Optimism’s CEO, touching on technical, business, and regulatory dimensions for retail and institutional investors alike.

Transcript

[TiVo]

Welcome to the Crypto 101 podcast, presented by Gemini, your bridge to the future of money.

[Brendan]

All right, everyone, welcome back to the Crypto 101 podcast. Hope everyone is having a great day out there. I'll tell you what, this is going to be a really exciting podcast. I know we come in, we say they're all going to be really exciting, but a little bit of a humble brag. I just think it's because we bring in the best guests. But today is going to be a very, very familiar one. Most of you are going to know who the project is, who the team is, a lot of their work, and I think you're going to find it interesting because we get to take a deep dive into not only Ethereum, but specifically the layer 2 side of Ethereum. So today we're joined here by Jing Wang. She is the founder and CEO of Optimism Jingle. Welcome to the show. It's great to have you.

[Jing Wang]

Yeah, thanks for having me.

[Brendan]

You know, it's funny for all of the video listeners out there, if you're watching on YouTube or one of our other sources where we have video, we were just bantering a little bit before this because myself and our producer, TiVo, we are coming in here, and I'm wearing a T shirt, I'm a little bit sunburned, and Jing is bundled up. And so we're just coming in from two different places of the United States as this snowstorm is hitting us across the board. And so, Jing, you know, we are appreciative of you coming in. We were joking that, hey, you're the CEO. You could have said, hey, we're taking a snow day, we're taking the day off. But you're saying, no, you know, you're going to be here, and of course you have a lot of great things to talk about. And the crypto market never sleeps, especially when it's decentralized and, you know, you work at home, which is always going to be a factor as well. But, Jing, nonetheless, great to have you here. I mean, let's just kind of get started and let the audience know a little bit about you. At what point did you first become interested in working with Ethereum? Because a short little note to front run, this idea is that optimism is really one of the leading two layer twos for Ethereum. Now, for everyone out there that's listening and you're saying, what's a layer two? A layer two is often referred to as a scaling solution. It is a layer that is built on top of Ethereum that Typically operates faster, cheaper, you can do more complex things on it. And Layer twos have become extremely popular in recent years. And we're going to talk more about this. And so, you know, at what point, Jing, did you first become interested and even maybe find out about Ethereum?

[Jing Wang]

I actually used to be a bitcoiner. I became familiar with Vitalik's work writing for Bitcoin magazine. I remember reading his article on BIP32, hierarchical deterministic wallets, and just being completely taken away by the clarity of technical writing, the simplicity with which he explained what I found to be a complex topic at the time as a student in college. And so that's how I became familiar with Vitalik and then with Ethereum. And when the opportunity presented itself in 2017, I took up a contract with the Ethereum foundation working on crypto economics research alongside Carl, who was appointed as our onboarding buddy at the time. And the other person in my kind of unofficial onboarding class was actually Hayden, who ended up starting Uniswap.

[Brendan]

Wow. And what year was all this again?

[Jing Wang]

This was late 2016, early 2017.

[Brendan]

Wow. Yeah. I mean, that's even before for the listeners out there, that's really before what I would say is the first real alt season. I think most of us felt the first real all season around 2017 leading into 2018. And so all that happens and then that kind of leads into optimism. Right. So walk us through that process of, of founding optimism. What led to that decision and really what you guys are all about over at optimism.

[Jing Wang]

Yeah. So the first category of scaling solutions was called plasma. And we iterated through like a dozen different designs, each with, you know, various minutiae in the technical trade offs. But at the time, you know, there weren't a lot of people using crypto. And CryptoKitties was just a single app. And it really took off in 2017 and it brought the network to its knees. Oftentimes the fees required to purchase a cryptokitty were in excess of the cost of the cryptokitty itself, which is really a terrible user experience if you're trying to build an application. And transactions were like anywhere between 10 and 15 minutes. Transaction fees could be up to $25. And so plasma was this theoretically infinitely scalable transactions per second solution. It just required you to write the contracts, smart contracts, in a different language. And as we started talking to more developers, we realized this was not an option. And so we went back to the drawing board and we developed optimistic rollups which enabled you to take the exact same solidity smart contracts that you had on Ethereum and port them over into a more scalable environment in essentially a single click. So that was really the key innovation of optimistic rollups. And on that we raised our seed round and the rest is history.

[Brendan]

Yeah, and now you all have been around since, I mean, what, for about seven years now, is that right? Oh God, it seems like that. I believe it was around 2019, 2020ish, at least, if my memory serves correct. And so the purpose, I'm sure, has evolved over the years as the crypto industry has evolved. What would you say that the primary purpose of optimism is now?

[Jing Wang]

I mean, I would say the mandate has always been the same, but the packaging has evolved. The goal has always been secure, decentralized, scalable computation. Our understanding of like the latency or the transactions per second, the gas throughput that we need to process has changed and evolved. Different use cases strain different parts of your network differently. And you know, we didn't know what the killer app was going to be in 2017.

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[TiVo]

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[Brendan]

Check Gemini's website for more details on rates and fees. Yeah, I think that makes sense. And one of the things that we've gotten to do over here, we've had the pleasure of doing it, is talking to both some of the Ethereum mainnet devs and talking to several of the different layer twos like yourself and I always like to ask them like and people like yourself, like, what you think or what do you think is the purpose of the Ethereum L1, the Ethereum mainnet versus the purpose of L2S? Like optimism.

[Jing Wang]

I mean, I think Vitalik stated it incredibly clearly in his vision post. Ethereum is for censorship, resistance, resilience, decentralization, and it will never compromise on those things, even if it means the cost is higher, even if it means latency is worse. Those are the key properties that the Ethereum L1 is optimizing for. And I love that. Having a very clear set of principles that never changes makes it so much easier for L2s to make different trade offs on top of the base layer. And we rely on the base layer for our security guarantees. So that's important for L2s. The beauty of L2s is that it's an environment that you can customize at will, and so different L2s will make vastly different trade offs. Security profile of one L2 chain could be very different from another L2 developed by another company. We basically help enterprises or these, like large super apps spin up their own blockchain environments. They typically don't want to deal with the spikes of traffic produced by other applications. They want consistent estimable fees for their user base, and they want to build the most ideal user experience for their user base. So Worldchain, for example, will care a little bit less about defi activity and more about keeping fees consistent for their human users. And World is blowing up in emerging countries right now where the average transaction size is only 25 cents, which is so different from the transaction profile that you see on like base. So for World we have things like priority human ordering when we order and sequence transactions on the blockchain. So small customizations like this that aren't available on Ethereum L1 you can use your L2s for.

[Brendan]

I'm glad that you brought up World because there's probably listeners out there who aren't familiar with a lot of the projects that are built on optimism. So could you walk us through a couple of maybe the most well known or the biggest or maybe just your favorite when it comes to projects that have been built on or through optimism?

[Jing Wang]

Yeah, I mean AI is taking off as you know and various platforms like Reddit or dating applications are being flooded with bots. And World's whole thesis is that verifying that you are truly a human is going to be valuable. And they've been working at this for many, many years and that thesis is proving out to be correct and they're at the forefront of it. So that's a really cool non financial use case. I think it's incredibly important, very legitimate and I'm very, very excited that World is one of our customers base is obviously pushing the envelope for what's possible. They truly are building a global financial and paving the way whether it's on the regulatory front or on the product innovation front. Their most recent event in San Francisco, they launched like a dozen different trading, lending, prediction products. Super, super impressive. I think there's an opportunity right now to innovate more quickly, launch products more quickly and reach a wider distribution of users on an open network. And so all of our customers are doing some form of that. Sony for example, in tokenizing. Sony IP on Sonium I think is also something to watch out for.

[Brendan]

So it sounds like, and again we've kind of heard this from a lot of the different project owners and people who are part of these things is that the L1 is kind of this big, I don't want to say all purpose, but very broad brush that you can use. And when it comes to L2s, it's a little bit more niche and focused on a job or a task or a business that needs to be done or specific problems that need to be addressed. And I think that's where the, the strength. That's what it sounds like. That's where the strength of these L2s come in. Correct?

[Jing Wang]

Yeah, totally. That's definitely one way to put it.

[Brendan]

Yeah. And so I read that optimism supported NETWORKS grew to represent 62, over 62% of Ethereum's activity. Is that true? And if so, what areas contributed the most to that?

[Jing Wang]

Among all L2s, that's our market share. Among the top 100 blockchains in crypto, I think we're around 14% market share.

[Brendan]

Wow.

[Jing Wang]

I think Solana processes more transactions than we do. And I'd have to double check this, but I don't think there's any other stack that exceeds the number of transactions that we process. What has produced that? I mean, transactions are incredibly fast and incredibly cheap, usually less than a hundredth of a cent, and they confirm in less than 250 milliseconds. But I think really what has produced that is that the way we operate is we embed into your team. Since this infrastructure is still pretty nascent compared to Internet infrastructure, and a lot of these use cases are also pretty different from each other, we really get in there with each of our partners and we understand their strategies. Our internal mantra is to become indistinguishable from someone on their team. And then, and only then, can we bring the correct product mindset, the correct architectural intuitions into how we progress the underlying infrastructure.

[Brendan]

When it comes to these specific areas, though, I mean, 62% market share amongst L2s is a lot, right? You know, that is a. It's a pretty dominant number. What areas, what verticals are you seeing the most growth or interest in right now? Because people see all these different headlines, right? And the headlines, they always change. Oh, NFTs are hot. Meme coins are hot, gaming's hot, Stablecoins are hot. Privacy, tokenization. And it's constantly changing. And right now you are seeing a lot of like, tokenization and stablecoin headlines. But what areas are truly contributing the most here?

[Jing Wang]

Yeah, totally. Mostly trading. You know, people want to tokenize their assets with the hopes that others will trade it. The types of assets that each chain wants to trade tends to be different. The kinds of arbitrage opportunities that might exist on one exchange on one chain would be different from that same exchange on another chain. And so each chain operator, whether it's Uniswap or Coinbase, has slightly different hypotheses that they want to test for the growth of their business. And we get in there and we build the unique nuanced features or accelerators that help them test those hypotheses more quickly.

[Brendan]

Do you think that some of those same areas you mentioned Trading and other things. Do you think some of those are, are also some of the most important sectors to watch out for this year?

[Jing Wang]

Yeah, totally the most important sector. I mean, at least if you're in crypto who believe that this is the future of finance, finance will come on chain. It is net better in almost every way. I mean, the UX will get there, the UX has improved year over year. But these are markets that are naturally open 24. 7. These are naturally global markets fast. You know, sub 250 millisecond things settle incredibly quickly. There's already a set of standards that every protocol shares and these are things that the traditional financial system either doesn't have or has worked very hard over decades to get. So yeah, definitely finance is coming on. Chain trading, lending, these are parts of it and a focus for 2026.

[Brendan]

You're right about that. We see a huge push towards tokenizing. I mean, you see Larry Fink from BlackRock talk about it. You see Jamie Dimon from JP Morgan talk about it. We personally talked about reports from bank of America and Citi and the list goes on. And there's been a lot of push for this. And now NASDAQ has come out and said, hey, you know, we want to start having a 24.5market and then we want to work our way towards a 24. 7 market. And you're seeing them say, hey, if the crypto market has done it so successfully for so long, they've kind of set the standard for this idea and clearly traders like it. And you're right, you know, we are seeing the traditional markets, even things as large as Nasdaq, start moving towards that and create partnerships. And it seems like that's the clear direction that they want to head in which, which I find fascinating. And so if they're publicly announcing this stuff, I think that listeners need to be on the watch for what supports that kind of infrastructure and build out. And right now I think most people can, you know, largely agree, you know, there you can, you can say, hey, some of this market share might go to some of these other chains. Maybe, maybe some goes here and there and you know, there's always going to be competition. But it does look as if right now, from an institutional standpoint that Ethereum, you know, in its entirety looks like it's winning the race in terms of where institutions are the most focused on infrastructure. Would you kind of say that you're seeing similar stuff?

[Jing Wang]

I agree with that. Ethereum is incredibly lindy. It's proven itself as a trustworthy Steward of an insane amount of capital. I think institutions and enterprises see how successful their defi counterparts have been. And companies like AAVE and Uniswap are behemoths in their own right. And you see this push from these companies towards legitimizing and starting to offer some of these more traditional financial services like AAVE with the recent launch of their app integrating a earn product. And then similarly with these more traditional fintechs starting to take a look at what crypto offerings they can make to their existing user base, there's definitely a commingling that's starting to happen. Like a battle of the super apps we call it internally. And the battle is good for us either way. We're the infrastructure that you want to be launching your financial products onto. So it's going to be fun for all of us to see.

[Brendan]

Well, speaking of infrastructure, I saw you say that 2025 reset expectations for what quote unquote production ready infrastructure actually means when legacy assumptions start to falter. Can you walk us through what that means? Because I think it kind of ties to the very point that we're talking about.

[Jing Wang]

Yeah, I mean we have more experience bringing enterprises on chain than any other stack or info provider. We've gotten a glimpse into the levels of diligence and kyc, whether it's across the code base or compliance, uptime, security latency that these companies have. And it's just completely different from what our crypto customers demanded of us previously. Whereas crypto customers might have been okay with a little bit more downtime or less ideal UX for their customers, the quantity of customers and the expectations that Web2 companies have set for them are just a completely different ballgame. And so there's a lot of terms that crypto companies may not even have heard of, like SOC 2 compliance that are part of the day to day vocabulary for enterprises as they evaluate what partners and integrations to rely on.

[Brendan]

Is that where you think like on chain systems win or do you think that that's where they lose compared to like more traditional capital and like traditional systems?

[Jing Wang]

I think that on chain systems have been built mostly from first principles about how money should move or how it's natural for money to move. And I think because of that on chain systems will win. Now there are also whether those regulations should exist or not. There are many rules that enterprises have to abide by today. And so where projects that start on the defi end of the spectrum, on the on chain end of the spectrum have built this UX from first principles, they might struggle a little bit to keep up with legitimizing and following these new regulatory requirements. And where the larger companies might be a little bit less agile, they're definitely a lot more in tune to what the regulation is today and can help write the next step of that. And so there's different advantages on each side of the spectrum. Where crypto companies may have a much more intuitive understanding of what kinds of financial products should be launched, the Tradfi companies have a much more intuitive understanding of what it's really like to deal with 50 million daily active users.

[Brendan]

Yeah, and it's, there's a lot to go on there, especially when the expectation is full uptime, no faltering, and there's a lot of moving parts that go into that. It feels like one of the arguments that we've seen is that these larger companies, the people that are coming from Tradfi and outside the world of crypto and blockchain as people, have posed the question, why don't they do this themselves or will they do this themselves? And it seems like we've seen pretty mixed results so far where there have been some people to do some things by themselves, but there's been no, like, clear answer to that. I think if you look at what a lot of these asset managers and banks have done, some of them have done partnerships, some of them have built their own products, some of them have done their own things, but it's largely on Ethereum instead of creating their own chain. Right. So we've seen kind of these quasi models where they are saying, well, we're going to be on Ethereum, but we might do our own thing on Ethereum. And then some just, you know, outsource to crypto natives and they say, hey, you know, just handle this all for us. Where do you think that the balance beam is going to like push towards or drift towards as this becomes more popular? Do you see these companies coming on chain outsourcing or doing it themselves?

[Jing Wang]

For enterprises, there is always some degree of risk that you have to manage yourselves. And so anything relating to that risk that that company is accountable to the law, to the government for has to be done in house. Now the hard thing to understand about crypto is like where you actually produce risk. Let's say you know nothing about crypto, you just know a little bit about Bitcoin and Ethereum as assets. You're this like, you know, you're a manager at a fintech, you're looking at the roadmap for what you want your team to accomplish. You think crypto is super interesting. Where do you even begin? You know, like if you ask five different blockchain engineers to define a chain, you get five different answers. I asked my co founders to define this and they all came with different answers. You can call it a database, you can call it a linked list, you can call it a bridge with a proof system. There's so many different ways to describe it. And it's not an intentional malice from the industry to confuse. It's simply that there's so much nuance at the protocol level and not enough abstractions that have been built up for easy education to newcomers. So you have to understand what's an L1, what's an L2, what is even a chain. And then, and then people might be pitching you on ZK or on like, you know, Aptos, Sui, Solana, Ethereum, all these different options. How do you even evaluate who's right, who do you like, where do you go and who do you ask? And then if you do want to dive into crypto now, there's all these different asset issuers, all these different regulations that you have to comply with. Now you have to integrate with an exchange. There's a dozen of them. They all have different ways to think about pricing. And then once you do, let's say, launch a stablecoin, which people think is the simplest thing to do. Now you're competing with everybody and their mother who's also launched a stablecoin, and they're hemorrhaging incentives to get 14% APY. And you have to compete with that too if you want adoption of your stablecoin. It's just so much to think about. And if that doesn't work out, then what do you like do? Integrate with an EARN product? There's so many different options. And where we have found success as a team is getting in there at the beginning innings of somebody considering what their crypto strategy should be. You don't have to go and understand what an asset issuer does or what a chain does. You have to understand what are your moves as a company, how do you want to expand? Do you want to start offering more crypto services? Is it the crypto market that you want to onboard onto your platform? Is it more yield opportunities for your existing users? Once enterprises have their business strategy down, we are their partners for guiding them through the crypto native implementation of that strategy.

[Brendan]

Working across teams is tough, but Asana helps you handle it. That's because Asana is where humans and AI coordinate, work together. AI can spot Roadblocks and assign work in a snap so everything and everyone stays on track. That's how work gets handled. That's Asana.

[TiVo]

Visit [e-mail] that's asana.com if you're the purchasing manager at a manufacturing plant, you know, having a trusted partner makes all the difference. That's why hands down, you count on Grainger for auto reordering. With on time restocks, your team will have the cut resistant gloves they need at the start of the their shift and you can end your day knowing they've got safety well in hand. Call 1-800-granger. Click granger.com or just stop by Granger for the ones who get it done.

[Brendan]

Yeah, and I, you know, I would say it's time to throw the buzzword around. You know all the listeners are going to love this. They love every time we get to talk about BAS and the base ecosystem. But you know, it's a little bit maybe different from the enterprise side that you were just talking about. But I mean, BAS uses your tech and I don't think you can miss that with the explosive growth that they've seen over the last year or two. But can you just walk us through that? Because people are going to hear that and go, what? I thought BAS was its own layer two. What do you mean that bas, the layer two uses optimism, the layer two and that they use their tech? Like what does that mean and how do they benefit from it?

[Jing Wang]

Totally. So all of the code that the base blockchain uses is written by us with great input from the phenomenal Coinbase engineering team. They've been really pushing the limits of scaling more so than any other application. And so they have been a really exciting customer to partner with because they have added enormous clarity to our roadmap and where we should actually focus for that level of throughput. Base is the perfect example of this. They've really written the playbook here. They knew what they wanted their business strategy to be. They had an idea of the crypto products that they wanted to launch, the kinds of users that they wanted to target, and they were just bottlenecked by the scalability of the infrastructure that they wanted to launch these on chain products onto. And so it's not the case that if you launch a stablecoin you'll suddenly become successful. It's not the case that if you launch a blockchain you will suddenly become successful. You need to have a business strategy and all of these auxiliary things are simply tools to go out and implement the business strategy. Yeah, BAS has been a phenomenal success. Really impressive team there.

[Brendan]

Yeah, it has been. And it's cool to see the crypto ecosystem support each other. Right. And they're building, they're working, and it's collaborative and it's not this, this hostile environment where everyone's at each other's throats necessarily for market share and they're trying to eliminate each other. And it's just not really the way that it works for the most part over here. But one of the other big areas, again, shifting gears a little bit here and we have to talk about it because just as. As popular as BAS has become, Stable Coins as well, huge, huge increase. In fact, we just had, for the listeners out there, you probably just saw this episode, but we just had one of the lead guys from tether on and we were talking to him about just everything that was going on. He's one of the former CEO, former co founder, and we just talked to him about the stablecoin industry and the historic rise that it's seen in recent years. But stablecoins have kind of shifted the challenge from speed and fees to, to more reliability and continuity and response and all these things. What have you seen on the stablecoin front? I'm just curious to get your input on it all.

[Jing Wang]

Yeah, I mean, there's definitely been an explosion in the launch of stablecoins and deposit tokens and stable assets. So, like algorithmically stable tokens. You know, I think it's interesting. Right now you have these silos of liquidity that happen from one chain to another. And there are solutions like across and layer zero, that help with the latency of bringing liquidity from one state space, like one blockchain, to another blockchain. And the more tools you build to reduce the latency, reduce the risk of moving capital, reduce the cost of capital between chains, the more of a surge you see in things like trading activity, the size of trades that can be done. And so one of the beautiful things about the OP stack is that all op stack chains share a set of standards for the transmission of information. And so a dollar between two OP stack chains moves much more seamlessly than it would between any two other blockchains, because each blockchain has such a different architecture and such a different risk profile. So this is part of the kind of collaboration that you see. You'd think, oh, Uniswap, huge exchange base, huge exchange. Are they at each other's throats? Not really. Uniswap is using the blockchain unichain in a Very different way. They really pushed us on latency last year, whereas BASE was really pushing us on throughput last year. And so we developed a latency feature for Uniswap and rolled it out to the rest of the blockchain. In partnership with flashbots and with base, we continuously increased the throughput, the gas throughput of the chain, and all chains utilizing the OP stack also benefited from that. So that includes World, that includes Sodium, that includes inc, which is Kraken's chain.

[Brendan]

Yeah. So to put a nod on this, do you think that Stable coins are living up or can live up to the hype? Because there is lots of attention about it growing and use cases and all these things. I mean, are we even properly kind of prepared to scale to that extent quite yet, or do you think maybe a little bit more needs to be done? I know we're also. We'll talk about the Clarity act and Market structure and Genius act and all these other ones. But real quick, your thoughts?

[Jing Wang]

Yeah, I mean, I think. This one is a nuanced one because.

[Brendan]

It'S not an easy question.

[Jing Wang]

Stablecoins, it reminds me of like the NFT boom. And people would ask, well, what do you think is going to happen with NFTs? And the reality was that one company's implementation of an NFT was so different from another company's implementation of an nft. You can think of an identity as an nft, an ID card or a passport. Now the way that you would utilize that is so different from the way that you would utilize a piece of artwork, which is also considered an nft. And so for assets that are considered stable assets, again it's just a broad, general tool. There's so many different ways that that tool can be utilized. And so I think of it across kind of like three categories of utilization. In the first category of utilization, it's a ST asset to trade against. And so for stable assets to trade against. Liquidity, trade size, the ability to unify previously siloed pools of capital into one pool of capital gives you better pricing, latency, trading efficiency. These are the features that we're really focused on in 2026 and bringing to the OP stack. So if you want your stablecoin on the OP stack and you not only want it to access markets on Uniswap, but you also want it to access markets on op, Mainnet or Base, we make that super simple and super fast for you. So one of our goals this year is to bring that 30 second bridging latency between chains to four seconds, which again, greatly reduces, greatly increases the efficiency of moving capital across chains. So it's like one of the categories. A second category is like deposit tokens. Tokens that are representative of a deposit of capital you've made in an application. Different depositing in different protocols might earn you different amounts of yields. They might come with different properties, might be subject to different regulatory restrictions, depending on the entity that you're depositing into. And the third is algorithmic stables. And so you take on a little bit of the risk of this stable asset not being one to one, backed up by some physical asset, and instead you get exposed to greater risk but also greater yield, which is part of the, I don't know, fun, maybe dangerous, beautiful part of defi. What happens across all these three buckets, I don't really know, but I do know that all three buckets require latency, throughput, and security. And that's our roadmap.

[Brendan]

I think it's very well said. And I think one of the final questions that we've seen circulating around. We got a big community here. Shout out to Crypt Nation and shout out to everyone else who's a part of Momentum, Money makers and all, all the other guys over here that are. That are behind the scenes and all the community members. But one of the big ones that we see floating around is like, hey, guys, what's going on with, like, just the entire state of the crypto market? And we'll narrow it down here to the L1 and L2 side of a theory, but what's going on? Because the reoccurring theme that we see is there's a lot of positive fundamental growth. There's positive retail attention and institutional attention, and there's builders, and there's. There's a lot that is desired to be done, and there's no shortage of that. But then people kind of look at the crypto market right now and they're like, hey, you know what's going on? So what would you say is going on with the current state of Ethereum? Because again, I would say at the. Not even at the surface level, you can't even say it like that. I would say deep behind the scenes and at the surface level, it looks good, but maybe it just doesn't feel right. And it feels like sentiment is maybe a little bit, or not even sentiment, but maybe morale is a little bit low.

[Jing Wang]

And so I think that's why you have these two almost like opposing signals where you have real enterprise interest, real mainstream interest. Looking at crypto for the first time yet you also have one of the worst markets in crypto history.

[Brendan]

And.

[Jing Wang]

If you looked at crypto tokens before, it didn't seem like, for the 99.99% of crypto tokens, that you could use the traditional equities valuation model to value crypto tokens. And I know they're not the same, but if we're finding parallels to try to attempt to make sense of what's happening to the market, that seems to be a parallel. Man, I. I don't think I should be saying this, but I feel like. I feel like we definitely can't publish this. But wait, hold on.

[Brendan]

Don't get yourself in trouble.

[Jing Wang]

Can we skip this one? I think, yes. It's not good. I don't think I should be recording this.

[Brendan]

We. We can 100.

[Jing Wang]

In short, I think real eyeballs are looking at crypto now, and things that were based on pure hype and narrative are coming a lot closer to reality now also. And so, like, you know, the meta in 2026 is revenue for everybody. All crypto protocols will need to be talking about revenue with stricter requirements than they have previously. A lot of revenue reporting for crypto projects hasn't been done with the same level of scrutiny that a coinbase might do their revenue reporting. And these are all factors that people take into consideration when evaluating the crypto market.

[Brendan]

Yeah, no, I think that makes sense. And there's so many other things that are happening behind the scenes, and there's a lot going on. And the big thing that people are looking toward saying, hey, you know, this could be one of the things that, that get us out of this, because we had that large liquidation event. Not just large, the largest liquidation event that the crypto market has ever seen. And we saw that happen in October. We've continued to feel some of the side effects and lingering ripple effects that have come out of that. There's been fear. Oh, well, the Clarity act isn't getting passed as soon as it could have been passed. And there's fears about this and that. And there's just FUD floating around, right? FUD stands for fear, Uncertainty and doubt. And there's just that floating around. But one of the big areas that people are looking towards right here, they're saying, hey, I think that maybe the Clarity act and the market structure Bill, can be two of the things that look like they're going to get combined into a single thing, but it looks like that could be one of the things that could bring us out of that. And I was just listening To David Sachs, who is the AI and crypto czar of the United States, talking about this. And he says, there is so much money and there are so many companies that are sitting on the sidelines who are waiting for this stuff to get passed. And that lines up with what we've heard a lot on the podcast is a lot of these different crypto groups were saying, hey, you know, for the longest time, we were scared to add that token or, you know, add that other token. And sometimes we'd add something and have to remove it. Sometimes it was just features and updates and upgrades, and we would add something and then have to remove that or we'd get in legal trouble. And so there's so many different groups that are just saying, hey, we want to sit on the sidelines until. Until this stuff gets clarified. Hence the name of the Clarity act or their structure. Hence the. The name of the market structure, Bill. And once we get that, there is so much that can be done, there's so much that can be added into and that really does create a new wave of innovation. And with innovation, expands potential market share. And so that's where I think we're sitting here. And that's what it feels like, at least from my kind of outside perspective and opinion on the matter. That's where it feels like Ethereum is at right now. And from your experience, there's, again, you guys are working with all sorts of different groups and people, and you're bringing people on chain, and it seems like you're seeing that as well. Are you guys anticipating that this stuff could pick up with those two different, you know, bills or acts getting passed? Is that something that you are thinking about?

[Jing Wang]

I really desperately hope. Hope so. I mean, so much changes day to day, and the bill gets written and rewritten. And I basically look at the attitude of my GC when I come into the office to kind of get a sense for how things are going. But I think the United States has a really incredible opportunity here. This is where crypto innovation is happening. The brightest thinkers in crypto and in financial systems are in the United States. Everywhere around the world, technology wars on AI or car manufacturing, chip manufacturing are being played. But really the United States is uniquely where engineering, financial systems is happening. This is by far the best talent pool and the most advanced thinking. And I think the US has an opportunity here to capitalize on by providing really clear regulation to all the innovators here. And for us, I mean, I think we. We try to navigate the ambiguity by thinking first through consumer protection. If you look at existing financial regulation, a lot of it is written with the intention of protecting consumers. And so we try to think through first principles around that in order to navigate some of the areas where it's not as clear cut, how we should be behaving.

[Brendan]

There's a lot going on. I don't even try to understand all of the potential legal side and the looking into all the fine print and what it could all mean. Listen, that's why we bring the guests on in the first place and experts like yourself to talk about this stuff. Let's assume things go well. Let's assume this stuff starts to get passed and everything starts playing together. What does your perfect future for optimism look like? Your absolute perfect picture, perfect future and things go according to plan. What does that look like for optimism? And what role do you play in kind of connecting all this?

[Jing Wang]

Yeah, my team hates this question because every year I'll set the goal and I'll be like, this is our future. And that's as far into the future as I can see, because we haven't gotten there yet. And then we'll hit that goal and then there will be a new perfect future. You know, if you'd asked me when I started this, it would be a dream that we're doing 14% of all crypto transactions today. And now I'm like, oh man, the crypto market itself is not big enough and we should be doing 80% of all crypto transactions. Why not? I think for us, the perfect future is one where finance is coming on chain because we're providing a genuinely better user experience than what the traditional financial system has to offer. That all these weird, nuanced research things that we've been thinking through over the years are resulting in actually freeing liquidity out of its silos and lowering the transaction times, maybe lowering remittances globally, making it easier for people to borrow, lend, predict and manage their own finances. That whole dream of having your own Swiss bank in your pocket. Banks don't just securely custody your funds, they offer you a variety of services around those funds. And that's really what DEFI is trying to do. And optimism is here to make it so that that DEFI innovation happens faster and at scale. So that's my dream. I think it'll take us a little bit of time to get there, but it'd be really cool.

[Brendan]

Well, on the roadmap, is there any big updates or partnerships or any sneak peeks that you can give us of the roadmap for this year?

[Jing Wang]

For the Roadmap. I mean, it will probably be pretty boring. To your listeners it is just continuously scaling the scaling solution and removing bottlenecks. And to us, bottlenecks aren't just gas throughput. Bottlenecks are also bottlenecks for moving capital. So being able to do larger transaction sizes faster between chains, do more trades more quickly, more swaps across all chains, that's really it. And there's dozens of different boring sounding things that we have to do to achieve that, like block access lists. But I don't think your audience needs an explanation of that. I do. They.

[TiVo]

All right everybody, TiVo here punching back in a crypto 101 first. Literally, Brendan has lost power. There's a thunderstorm happening down here in Florida. Some lightning struck around Brendan's house. He said he saw a big flash in his power Internet computer. Everything went out. So TiVo here jumping back in with Jing. We really appreciate her coming on. We're 45 minutes in. We were literally about to wrap up anyway, so I'm going to jump in here and take it the rest of the way. Jing, thank you so much for coming on. It was a great conversation. Is there anything else that you wanted to leave our listeners with around optimism? Give us a final thought and then tell our audience where they can find you on X and Optimism on X or any other websites that you want to plug.

[Jing Wang]

Yeah, Jobs Optimism IO is a great website. You can find me on X at jinglejamop. And the final thought here, I guess is that for the last many years we have supported the fastest growing and the most resource intensive applications in crypto. And today our partners generate up to three times more profit per dollar that they bring on chain in comparison to the most successful chains on other stacks. And that isn't just because we're building infrastructure. It's because we are strategic partners that really help you remove the blockers to growing your business specifically. So whether you are a growing application and you want to fast track your journey to becoming a super app, come talk to us. If you've got latent assets under custody and you want to maximize the productivity of those assets on chain, come talk to us. If you're at a consulting firm or a bank or a fintech and you want to better understand how to put together your crypto strategy. Also come talk to us. Don't worry about what an L1 or an L2 is or this or that. We've worked at literally every single layer of the stack with every kind of integrator and we will partner with you to make map out your strategy and we can refer you to the right teams. So thank you for listening.

[TiVo]

Yeah, for sure. Perfect way to tie a bow on it. Check out optimism for everything that Jing just mentioned. Thank you so much for joining us today. It was really was a fascinating conversation of how you guys kind of view yourselves and, and kind of going into the future of crypto of where we are and how do we look at these projects again, whether it's a layer one or layer two, what are you bringing of value? And you certainly, certainly laid out your case here and put a great piece of content out for our community. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you everybody for listening and we'll see you all on an episode very, very soon. Goodbye everybody.

[Brendan]

Working across teams is tough, but Asana helps you handle it. That's because Asana is where humans and AI coordinate work together. AI can spot roadblocks and assign work in a snap. So everything and everyone stays on track. That's how work gets handled. That's Asana.

[TiVo]

Visit [e-mail] that's asana.com Asana if you're.

[Jing Wang]

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[Brendan]

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[Jing Wang]

Well, Mint Mobile is exciting, extending their.

[Brendan]

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[Jing Wang]

So here's the idea.

[Brendan]

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[Jing Wang]

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[Brendan]

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[Jing Wang]

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[Jing Wang]

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[Brendan]

Per month when network is busy.

[Jing Wang]

See terms.