A day after setting off a frenzy of Twitter speculation by tweeting out an orange dot, the crypto arm of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) has revealed its blockchain infrastructure plans: Magi, a rollup client for Optimism.
Magi is still in development and months away from being a production-ready offering, according to an announcement posted by crypto engineer Noah Citron.
The project is a new client for OP Stack, the standardized, open-source development stack that powers Optimism. The client is written using the Rust programming language and is meant to serve as a faster alternative to op-node, the only existing rollup client that’s maintained by OP Labs and written in the Go programming language. A16z’s thesis is that more clients makes for more robust decentralization for Optimism, and the addition of a Rust-based client will attract more developers.
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On Tuesday, Citron tweeted out an orange dot with “coming soon,” which Twitter users tied to Coinbase’s similar tweet of a blue dot ahead of its Optimism-based layer 2 announcement. A16z CTO Eddy Lazzarin responded, saying that the firm wasn’t working on a layer 2 blockchain.
