A scalability solution for Ethereum Boba Networks announced on Tuesday that it had secured $45 million from a group of investors that included Crypto.com, Huobi, and BitMart, among others. The project is valued at $1.5 billion in the Series A financing. The Ethereum blockchain is home to hundreds of billions of dollars, but while developers and security experts praise it, it’s no secret that the blockchain as it now stands hasn’t kept up with the times.
This is why you hear so much about layer 1 (L1) and layer 2 (L2) networks: venture capitalists are betting on rival L1 blockchains to take advantage of the gap, and L2 blockchains built on top of Ethereum are supposed to enhance transaction speed and pricing. Boba is developing an optimistic rollup L2 that essentially processes a number of transactions on the secondary chain while “optimistically” assuming that the outputted list of bundled transactions is all legitimate — while giving skeptical parties time to prove that any of the transactions were fraudulent and reverse them.
It’s a technology that’s been widely acknowledged as a near-term solution for the Ethereum network, and VCs have already given it names like Optimism and Arbitrum to other unicorns in the optimistic rollup field. Boba provides quick exits supported by community-driven liquidity pools, reducing the Optimistic Rollup exit period from seven days to just a few minutes and providing LPs with yield farming options.
Developers throughout the Ethereum ecosystem will be able to leverage Boba’s extensible smart contracts to create dApps that call code performed on web-scale infrastructure like AWS Lambda, allowing them to employ techniques that are either too costly or impossible to execute on-chain. Boba Network wants to be the People’s L2 by prioritizing users and developers. The objective is to create a practical L2 that will pave the way for Ethereum to reach the next billion users. The Enya team, as essential contributors to the OMG Foundation, developed Boba, an L2 Ethereum scaling and augmenting solution.
Boba Network is an Optimistic Rollup that combines Optimism’s excellent open source work with the Enya & Boba team’s research and development efforts on swap-based onramps, rapid exits, and cross-chain bridging. We selected Optimism as our platform since it is basically a tweaked version of Ethereum, making it reasonably simple to assure EVM and Solidity compatibility, reducing the time and work necessary to move smart contracts from L1 to L2.
