Jinglan Wang is the founder of Optimism, a blockchain-based protocol designed to facilitate the development and deployment of decentralized applications (dApps) on the Ethereum network. ^[1][2]

Career

Education & Early Career

Wang was the Executive Director of the Blockchain Education Network, a global web of over 3,000 students in 60 countries. She started her crypto journey through the MIT Bitcoin Club. ^[1]

In a 2018 Forbes article on women in crypto, Wang stated, “The goal is two-pronged for us: the first is to learn, develop, and evangelize blockchain technology. The second is to build strong flourishing communities by promoting technological literacy with decentralized technologies”. ^[3]

She studied art and computer science at Wellesley College, but eventually, she dropped out and started her own company called Eximchain. After leaving the company before their ICO, she worked at NASDAQ as a product manager for their blockchain projects, as she was a fellow at the IDEO blockchain fellowship, which was sponsored by NASDAQ. ^[5]

After embracing Bitcoin maximalism, Jinglan Wang was introduced to the Ethereum community by Vitalik Buterin, which sparked her interest in this blockchain technology. Subsequently, she relocated to San Francisco to collaborate with Joseph Poon on Handshake, a decentralized naming system project. ^[5]

Optimism

Jinglan Wang began her involvement in Plasma, now Optimism, by participating in Cryptoeconomics.Study course alongside Karl Floersch, which is now overseen by Kevin Ho. While working on the course, specifically on the plasma chapter, she realized the concept seemed relatively straightforward and questioned why it hadn't been implemented yet. Although she was initially unaware of ongoing implementation efforts, the team, including Jinglan, Karl Floersch, Ben Jones, and Kelvin Fichter (no longer involved in the project), took the initiative and independently started working on building Plasma. ^[5]

In 2018, Jinglan Wang co-founded Optimism, a layer-2 scaling solution aimed at addressing scalability concerns on the Ethereum blockchain. Optimism provides developers with a platform to construct and release dApps on Ethereum. ^[4]