A16z’s mystery ‘orange ball’ revealed — new L2 rollup client ‘Magi’

Venture capital firm A16z revealed the secret behind its tweets that featured an orange ball – the launch of a new Layer 2 rollup client called Magi.

Magi, a new rollup client developed in Rust — has been built on the OP Stack — a software stack specifically designed to create a blockchain dApp ecosystem centered around the Optimism Layer 2 network.

According to the official April 19 announcement, its goal is to enhance diversity and improve the OP Stack ecosystem.

A16z new L2 rollup to enhance latency, speed

The newly launched Layer 2 rollup client is still under development, and the venture capital firm plans to make it a viable alternative to existing clients. A16z aims to improve the client’s latency, sync speed, and testing frameworks to enhance its performance.

In the world of blockchain, a client serves as a gateway for users to access and interact with the network. It validates transactions and keeps a local copy of the blockchain. Diversity in clients is crucial to ensuring that the network remains resilient and secure without relying on a single point of failure.

The blog reads,

“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.”

As reported by CryptoSlate on April 18, Noah Citron — a crypto engineer, posted a tweet featuring an orange dot with the words “coming soon.” This sparked speculation among Twitter users, who compared it to Coinbase’s announcement of a blue dot before revealing its Optimism-based layer 2 solution. A16z Crypto’s CTO, Eddy Lazzarin, responded to the rumors, denying that the firm was working on a layer 2 blockchain.

Andreessen Horowitz— with over $7 billion in dedicated funds for investments in the crypto sector—is among the most prominent investors. A16z Crypto, which is a subsidiary of Andreessen Horowitz, has invested in Optimism, a startup that focuses on Ethereum scaling and was established at the beginning of 2020.

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