a16z to Launch Magi, an Optimism-based Rollup Client

a16z announced it will launch an OP Stack rollup client called Magi. Written in Rust, Magi aims to offer an alternative to op-node, the existing rollup client.

Magi will act as the consensus client (often called a rollup client in the context of the OP Stack) to feed new blocks to the execution client in order to advance the chain. It will support any OP Stack chains, including Optimism and Base.

op-node is the only existing rollup client now, which is written in Go and maintained by OP Labs. a16z wants to use Rust-based Magi to improve the client diversity, as well as to attract more developers.

Currently, Magi can already sync to both the Optimism and Base testnets, but it still needs months of development to be ready for production use.