Optimism (OP)

Optimism (OP) is the governance token of the Optimism Collective, the community that oversees OP Mainnet and the OP Stack, an open-source software kit for building layer 2 networks on Ethereum. OP holders vote on protocol upgrades, on how the Collective's treasury is spent and on grants to developers. The token was launched in 2022 and first distributed to users through an airdrop.

OP is not used to pay fees: transactions on OP Mainnet and other OP Stack chains are paid in ether (ETH). OP Mainnet is an optimistic rollup that settles on the Ethereum blockchain. Its software is built mainly by OP Labs, while the Optimism Foundation supports governance. The network competes with Arbitrum (ARB) and Polygon (POL).

Optimism works like a franchise system. OP Labs wrote a detailed recipe for running a fast, cheap network that leans on Ethereum for its final records. Anyone can use the recipe for free, and a group of networks that follow it closely agree to work together and share a slice of their earnings with a common fund, much as franchise owners pay into a shared marketing pot.

The OP token is the vote in that system. It does not buy anything on the network itself; fees are paid in ether. Instead, OP holders and a separate group of "citizens" decide how the recipe changes and how the shared fund is spent, including rewards handed out after the fact to people whose work has proved useful to everyone.

Optimism began as Plasma Group, a research team working on Ethereum scaling, which became Optimism PBC in 2019 under founders including Jinglan Wang, Karl Floersch and Kevin Ho. Its rollup went live in stages from January 2021. The Optimism Foundation launched the OP token and the Collective in 2022, with the first airdrop to early users in May 2022.

The Bedrock upgrade of June 2023 rebuilt the network into the modular OP Stack, lowering fees and making the code easier for others to reuse. Coinbase launched its Base network on the OP Stack in August 2023, and permissionless fault proofs, which let anyone challenge an incorrect result, went live on OP Mainnet on 10 June 2024. Other chains joined the shared "Superchain", including World Chain, Kraken's Ink and Uniswap's Unichain. In February 2026 Base, the largest member, announced that it would move to its own in-house software and leave the Superchain, and the OP token fell sharply on the news.

Chains that join the Superchain agree to pay part of their earnings to the Collective. A standard member pays whichever is larger of two amounts:

• $R$ is the amount the chain pays to the Collective.
• $F$ is the chain's total transaction fee revenue.
• $C$ is what the chain spends posting its data to Ethereum.

For example, a chain that earns 1,000 ETH in fees and spends 400 ETH on Ethereum data would owe the larger of $0.15 \times 600 = 90$ ETH and $0.025 \times 1{,}000 = 25$ ETH, so it pays 90 ETH. When data costs are very high, the 2.5 percent floor applies instead. OP Mainnet itself sends all of its net profit to the Collective.

OP's initial supply was 4,294,967,296 tokens, and the design allows the supply to grow by up to 2 percent a year if governance chooses to activate inflation. The allocation set aside roughly a quarter for ecosystem funding, 20 percent for retroactive public-goods funding, 19 percent for user airdrops, and about 36 percent for early contributors and investors, released gradually under a vesting schedule. Several further airdrops followed the first; see tokenomics for how allocations like these shape supply.

Governance is split between two chambers. The Token House is made up of OP holders and their delegates, who vote on upgrades and grants. The Citizens' House, whose members hold non-transferable badges, runs Retro Funding, which rewards projects after they have shown value to the ecosystem rather than before. This two-chamber model is meant to stop large holders alone from controlling the DAO's spending.

OP gives holders no direct claim on network fees, so its value rests on governance rights and on the Superchain's success; Base's departure in 2026 showed how dependent the model was on one large partner. Like most rollups, OP Mainnet relies on a single sequencer to order transactions, run by the Foundation, and users wait about a week to withdraw to Ethereum through the official bridge. Early contributors' and investors' tokens enter circulation over time, and each token unlock adds selling pressure. Smart-contract bugs and bridge attacks are risks for every crypto bridge and rollup, and OP's price is volatile, as with other altcoins.

• Optimism
• Optimism documentation
• Optimism Collective governance forum