• Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto arm is developing a rollup client for Optimism called Magi.
• Magi is written in Rust and will provide an alternative to the existing op-node client, which is written in Go.
• The project was announced by crypto engineer Noah Citron after A16z teased an upcoming blockchain announcement with an orange dot on Twitter.
A16z Developing Rollup Client for Optimism Called Magi
Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) has revealed plans to develop a new blockchain infrastructure called Magi, a rollup client for Optimism. The client is written using the Rust programming language and is meant to serve as an alternative to op-node, the only existing rollup client maintained by OP Labs and written in the Go programming language.
Purpose of Magi
The purpose of Magi is to act as the consensus client in Ethereum’s execution/consensus split. It will feed new blocks to the execution client in order to advance the chain and perform core functionality alongside an execution node such as op-geth in order to sync with any OP Stack chain including Optimism and Base.
Twitter Speculation
The news comes a day after the firm teased a potential blockchain announcement by tweeting out an orange dot, which caused speculation among Twitter users that it could be related to Coinbase’s blue dot ahead of their Optimism-based layer 2 announcement. Chief Technology Officer Eddy Lazzarin responded saying his firm wasn’t working on anything similar but rather something “much more exciting.”
Noah Citron Announces Project
Crypto engineer Noah Citron then posted an official announcement revealing plans for Magi, noting that it is still months away from being production ready.
Conclusion
In conclusion, A16z’s crypto arm has announced plans for their upcoming project –Magi, a rollup client for Optimism written using Rust programming language as an alternative option from OP Labs’ existing op-node written in Go programming language– which was teased earlier this week via Twitter with a mysterious orange dot logo.