OVR L2 integration; The Road Ahead

Almost 4 months since the official launch of the OVR platform and it has been an amazing ride, yet not an easy one. Ethereum scaling issues were a huge challenge for OVR. In late November, the gas cost of minting an NFT was lower than $3 while today, it can be as high as $60. Considering that OVRLand base price is $10, such transaction cost could have easily destroyed our business model.

We’ve been able to react fast, firstly with a modified version (lighter) of NFTs and then with Light Minting 2.0 using Merkle Proofs for OVRLand ownership. Yet, the challenge still exists. In fact, since the inception of OVR, we envisioned some kind of scaling solution to allow for all of the decentralized micro-transactions that will be needed for the platform to be fully functional.

We’ve been exploring solutions such as Loom, xDAI, Matic(now Polygon) yet because of the trade-offs in terms of security and UX complexity that those side chain solutions would imply, we decided to bet on a fast implementation of L2s on Ethereum.

Well, looks like it was worth waiting since L2 is finally here with Rollups!
There are two main categories of Rollups, Zero-Knowledge (ZK) and Optimistic. Both are live on Ethereum but currently only Optimistic rollups can support a fully EVM. That means that Optimistic rollups now support all the smart contracts that exist on Ethereum L1 allowing projects to easily move on L2. And that is what’s currently happening. This week, groundbreaking news was released- Uniswap V3 will be live on the Optimism rollup framework on the 5th of May.

Guess what, OVR will also move to Optimism! It will be possible to trade on Uniswap V3 with very low slippage – thanks to concentrated liquidity and gas fees, same for bidding for OVRLands. That’s not all, also minting will become very affordable again. So, we will be able to mint all of the Light Minted OVRLands. Renting lands, paying for hosting fees and all of the other micro-transactions that we envisioned on the roadmap will be finally possible with accessible fees maintaining the same level of security as L1 Ethereum. It’s amazing to be in the right place at the right time. The coming months will be huge and we can’t wait to start integrating on Optimism.

Cool, but what’s the timeline? Optimism main net was expected to be launched by the end of April and is now postponed to July, so integration will not be soon yet we’re very confident that by 3rd quarter 2021 will be able to move most of OVR infrastructure on Rollups.

If you want to know more about how Rollups works, please refer to this excellent article by Vitalik himself.