Yesterday, Twitter users involved in the development and maintenance of Ethereum L2 blockchain Optimism filled the social network with posts depicting mysterious orange spheres and the text "coming soon."
The cryptic tweets have successfully built hype for the release of Magi, Optimism's new rollup or consensus client. The network's developers see Magi as their first step into the Optimism Collective, "a new type of community designed to reward public goods and build a sustainable future for Ethereum," according to the project's website.
A consensus client, sometimes called CL client, Beacon Node, or formerly Eth2, is used to achieve an agreement for validated data by implementing the proof-of-stake consensus algorithm.
As per the Twitter post from Noah Citron, the engineer at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (A16z), Maggi "takes the place of a consensus client (often called a rollup client) in the OP Stack, and works alongside an execution client such as op-geth to sync. Currently, OP Labs maintains op-node, the reference implementation. Magi performs the same functionality."
As the blog post from the development team explains Magi is "a blazing fast OP Stack rollup client written in Rust. 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." Magi's functionality enables synchronization with any of the OP Stack chains, which are open-source development stack chains that run Optimism.
Read also: New Optimism Collective to experiment with digital governance
Magi's developers believe their solution will prove highly useful for the rollup client side of client diversity, which does not get sufficient attention from Ethereum developers who focus more on the execution side. The team named a single rollup client that is available so far which is an op-node written in the Go programming language and maintained by OP Labs, the Optimism blockchain development team.
Citron cautions that Magi should not yet be considered a production-ready client, although its developers are working hard to reach that level of quality for their product. The engineer suggested using the OP Labs team's op-node mentioned above so far.
"We hope that building out this new Rust-based client will encourage greater safety and liveliness throughout the OP Stack, and bring more contributors into the ecosystem," Optimism's team said in the post.
"We hope to see others continue to work on implementations of other components of the OP Stack. Diversity across the board makes the protocol more resilient to failures. We will have more updates for you all in the future," Citron stated in a tweet.
