On April 19th, venture capital giant a16z announced the launch of Magi, a new rollup client for Ethereum’s layer-2 ecosystem, Optimism.
The move is aimed at advancing client diversity in the expanding layer-2 ecosystem, with a16z stating that “Multiple independent client implementations can help ensure the safety and liveliness of the network.”
Magi, which is an OP Stack rollup client written in Rust programming language, acts as the consensus client by feeding new blocks to the execution client to advance the chain.
The launch of Magi is significant as there was only one rollup client implementation at the moment, op-node. Magi will be an independently developed, drop-in replacement for op-node, adding to the rollup’s client diversity, which will hopefully encourage greater safety and liveliness throughout the OP Stack, and bring more contributors into the ecosystem.
Optimism is the second most popular Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution behind Arbitrum, with a total value locked of $2.09 billion, an all-time high.
Since the beginning of the year, TVL on the network has increased by 83%. The EVM-compatible Optimistic Rollup chain has a layer-2 market share of 21%. Its native OP token has retreated 6.8% on the day to trade at $2.50 at the time of writing.
The L2 market leader is Arbitrum One, which has a share of 66% from a TVL of $6.58 billion. TVL for the entire L2 ecosystem is just below $10 billion and cooling from an all-time high this week as crypto markets correct.
