With Base leaving the OP Stack solo, can the future of Opitimism still be optimistic?

Original article: DL News

Translation: PANews

A leading U.S. cryptocurrency exchange is radically overhauling its nearly three-year partnership with Layer 2 (L2) network developers: Coinbase’s Base blockchain will henceforth use its own code and no longer rely on Optimism’s OP Stack.

A spokesperson for Optimism confirmed that Coinbase will cease sharing Base Chain revenue with the Optimism consortium. This revenue sharing had accumulated to over $16 million during their partnership.

“This is a blow to short-term on-chain revenue,” OP Labs CEO Jing Wang said on the X platform, “but as the crypto community has been saying for a long time, we need to upgrade our business model.”

She added that Coinbase will continue to work with OP Labs as a client of OP Enterprise Services.

Base's "solo flight" has directly and severely impacted the price of the Optimism token OP. Since Wednesday, OP has plummeted by a quarter, trading at just under $0.14 at the time of writing, well below its all-time high of $4.84 set in 2024.

For a long time, Coinbase has been allocating 15% of its Base revenue to the Optimism consortium, the digital partnership that manages the OP Stack. To date, Base has contributed 8,387 ETH, equivalent to approximately $16.4 million based on Wednesday's prices.

This amount represents 41% of the Optimism Alliance's total historical revenue. In recent months, the revenue contribution from Base has surged, reaching 90% in January.

Therefore, this change could have a significant impact on Superchain . Superchain is a blockchain consortium built on the OP Stack, which includes Sony's Soneium, Uniswap's Unichain, Kraken's Ink, Worldcoin's World Chain, and Optimism's own OP mainnet.

Neither Jing Wang nor Coinbase responded to DL News's request for comment.

“We appreciate our three-year partnership with Base and are proud to have helped it become one of the most successful Layer 2 networks in history,” an Optimism spokesperson said in a statement to DL News. “Our focus remains on providing enterprise-grade blockchain infrastructure for the ecosystem, and we will continue to serve Base as an OP enterprise customer while they build their own independent technical architecture.”

"Disappointing"

OP Labs, a privately held company, has raised over $175 million from institutions such as Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and Paradigm. Its engineers are responsible for maintaining and upgrading the OP Stack, but any proposals must be approved by the Optimism consortium.

The Optimism Foundation, an affiliated entity, recently stated that it will transfer some of the responsibilities for funding OP Labs' operations to the consortium.

The "contributions" from SuperChain members are denominated in Ethereum. This multi-million dollar crypto asset was initially idle, and the consortium distributed grants in OP tokens to attract developers to SuperChain—more developers mean more applications, and more applications bring more users.

However, Optimism has recently begun using this Ethereum asset: Last March, the consortium approved staking a large portion of its Ethereum to generate passive income; just last month, the consortium also approved a buyback program , tying the value of OP tokens to the development of the Superchain. Half of the consortium's revenue will be used to buy back OP, while the foundation is authorized to manage the other half of the funds.

Why build a superchain?

“This is disappointing, but also expected on many levels,” PaperImperium, an anonymous member of GFX Labs, the Optimism Alliance’s representative body, told DL News. “Base has to be accountable to its shareholders and do what is in their best interest.”

OP Stack is open source code, which means that anyone can use it for free without needing an Optimism license.

"So why do public chains like Base, Mode, Worldcoin, Zora, and other superchains choose to share revenue?" Optimism wrote in a 2024 blog post. "The answer is that this network structure is designed to benefit the entire consortium."

The OP Stack upgrade was originally planned to integrate the various members of the Superchain from isolated blockchain consortia into a unified, interoperable network. "Despite years of technical development, this vision unfortunately has not been realized," PaperImperium said.

Coinbase stated that this move was to accelerate the upgrade process, simplify the code, and test features that may be available on Ethereum in the future .

"Without the top-notch technical support behind OP Stack, we wouldn't have gotten this far so quickly, and we are grateful for our collaboration over the past three years," Coinbase said in a blog post.

When Base first integrated with Optimism in 2023, it was eligible to earn up to 118 million OP tokens within six years. It is currently unclear how many tokens Base has already claimed, or what will happen to the remaining tokens.

On Wednesday, Optimism also received a piece of good news: the Ethereum staking protocol Ether.fi announced that it would migrate its crypto credit card business from the Layer 2 network Scroll to the OP mainnet.

“In the coming months, approximately 70,000 active cards, 300,000 accounts, and millions of dollars in user locked tokens (TVL) will be migrated to Optimism,” Optimism stated in a blog post. “This will make the OP mainnet a leading public blockchain in the payments sector.”

Regarding Coinbase, Wang stated that since Base is still using code developed by Optimism, it will continue to subscribe to OP Labs' "OP Enterprise: Mission-Critical" service. "If Base changes too much to no longer be the original OP stack, then they will no longer need our mission-critical support," she wrote.