It’s another day, another drama in the crypto ecosystem, this time with Ethereum scaling solution Optimism fending off accusations of favouritism just as its chief rival prepares to launch by month’s end.

Sushi chief technical officer Joseph Delong tweeted that the decentralised exchange may not deploy on Optimistic Ethereum because of the preferential treatment he said the platform had granted to Sushi’s chief competitor, Uniswap, the largest player in the space.

The exchange formerly known as SushiSwap is coming to Arbitrum One, which developer Offchain Labs announced on Saturday will open to end-users by the end of August with a “fair launch strategy”.

The New York-based company said it had given over 400 projects access to its mainnet and dozens had already completed their deployments.

“The era of Ethereum L2s is here and the time is now,” Offchain Labs wrote.

Both layer two solutions offer relief from the high gas (transaction) fees and congestion of base-level Ethereum. But there’s no way to easily move between the two platforms, and token transfers from either roll-up back to mainnet Ethereum take a week or two. Decentralised exchanges will have to establish pools of liquidity on each platform. So it isn’t clear if there’s room for two very similar layer two solutions to gain substantial traction.

Both Arbitrum One and Optimism are optimistic roll-ups, a different scaling method than Plasma and ZK roll-ups or a sidechain like Polygon.

Sushi also plans to deploy on OMGx, a lesser-known Ethereum optimistic roll-up currently in public testnet, Delong tweeted in an “alpha leak”.

Users in Arbitrum One’s Discord channel were being told to consider the launch date “to be the last day (of August) for the time being”.

‘Uniswap has to go first’

Circling back to Delong’s tweetstorm.

He said Sushi had deployed to Optimism’s testnet and was preparing to deploy on mainnet, “including debugging part of Optimism’s platform”.

But Delong said that during a call with Optimism’s leadership “with a lot of dancing around the premise,” the Sushi team finally had to ask, “Are we going to be treated equally on deployment?”

“That is when the team told us point blank that Uniswap ‘had to go first,’ Delong wrote. “Meaning we were boxed out of deployment until Uniswap,” which deployed on Optimism last month.

For context, according to Dappradar, Uniswap is the leading decentralised crypto exchange with 345,000 users and US$20.7 billion in trading volume in the past 30 days. Sushi has 56,000 users and US$10 billion in volume.

‘Manufactured Twitter outrage’

Melbourne-based Ethereum thought leader Anthony Sassano tweeted that he was “disappointed to see this”.

“I’m only long-term bullish on credibly neutral and permissionless platforms (whether that be L1 or L2). There’s no place in this ecosystem for walled gardens – I hope the Optimism team rectifies this,” he wrote.

But Jinglan Wan, co-founder and chief executive of Optimism, replied that the San Francisco-based Optimism public benefit corporation was merely being cautious.

“We are whitelisting projects as quickly as possible and still maintain the safety of an alpha system. Uniswap deployed ahead of Sushiswap because they engaged with us 1.5 years ago, long before Sushiswap. First in, first out is not ‘playing favorites,’ Optimism’s official account tweeted.

Uniswap creator Hayden Adams also didn’t see a problem.

But the Sushi community seemed to have Delong’s back.

“Imagine permissioned finance inside defi. This has that VC stench all over it. We didnt come to defi for this bullshit. Defi is for everyone, i wont be deploying my capital on optimism. Thats for sure. Behind $sushi team all the way,” one person tweeted.

While Ethereum is a decentralised, permissionless environment, Arbitrum One and Optimism are neither at the moment — although both projects are promising that will change soon.

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