Optimism (OP): how OP Mainnet and the Superchain work, who holds the keys and what changed after Base left

When people search for Optimism crypto they usually mean OP Mainnet, an Ethereum layer 2 network that opened in 2021, or OP, the governance token of the Optimism Collective. Behind both sits the OP Stack, open-source code that other companies use to run chains of their own. The project was built on one bet: dozens of chains would share that code, the same upgrade keys and part of their revenue. It called that group the Superchain.

2026 tested the bet hard. In February Base, the chain run by Coinbase and the largest built on the OP Stack, said it would move to its own software and stop sharing revenue with the Collective. OP Labs laid off 20 employees in March. Since then the Optimism Foundation and OP Labs have sold the OP Stack as a managed service for banks, exchanges and brokers under the name OP Enterprise, kept a pilot that turns half of incoming revenue into OP buybacks, and on 22 October 2026 proposed to stop electing the Security Council that holds the upgrade keys.

This page explains how the network works, who can change it, what the OP token does and does not give its holders, and where Optimism stands against its closest rival, which has its own Coindaro page on Arbitrum. Figures are as of 27 October 2026 unless another date is given.

What is Optimism crypto? An optimistic rollup that settles on Ethereum

OP Mainnet is a rollup: it executes transactions on its own network, then posts the data to Ethereum, so anyone can rebuild the chain and check it. It is “optimistic” because results are assumed correct unless someone proves otherwise during a challenge window. Fees are paid in ETH, not in OP. The chain ID is 10, and OP Mainnet and “Optimism” are the same network: the chain was renamed, the company and the Collective kept the old name.

Transactions arrive at a sequencer. According to the OP Stack documentation, the chain operator runs a consensus client (op-node or the newer kona-node) beside an execution client (op-reth), which orders transactions from a private mempool. A program called op-batcher then writes the data to Ethereum, using blobs since March 2024. Other nodes, called verifiers, rebuild the same chain from what sits on Ethereum and need no trust in the sequencer.

A single operator runs that sequencer. If it censors a user or goes down, the user can push a transaction through Ethereum directly; L2BEAT puts the delay for that forced inclusion at up to 12 hours.

Fault proofs and the week-long withdrawal

The check on the sequencer comes when money leaves. A proposer posts “output roots”, claims about the state of the chain, to a contract on Ethereum. Anyone running the op-challenger software can dispute a false one, and the dispute is settled by a game played on Ethereum that narrows the disagreement down to a single step of computation. A user who withdraws first proves the withdrawal against an output root, then finalises it once the game has resolved. L2BEAT lists a challenge period of three and a half days plus an execution delay of three and a half days, which is why withdrawals through the official bridge take about a week.

Permissionless fault proofs went live on OP Mainnet on 10 June 2024, after votes in both governance houses. “Governance-approved, permissionless fault proofs are live on OP Mainnet, and with them the OP Stack arrives at Stage 1,” Optimism wrote that day; OP Labs, Base and Sunnyside Labs built the system. It did not stay on for long. On L2BEAT’s record, OP Mainnet fell back to permissioned games on 17 August 2024 because of a bug, and the open system came back on 12 September, the day after the Granite hard fork fixed it. Permissionless proofs were off for about four weeks.

Since then the proof program has been rewritten. Upgrade 19b, executed on 25 June 2026, switched the respected game type to one using Kona, a proof program written in Rust. Upgrade 20, executed on 24 September 2026, moved the system from single-chain output roots to multi-chain “super roots”. Optimism describes it as groundwork for interop: each chain still uses its own dispute games, and cross-chain messages wait for a later hard fork.

Stage 1 on L2BEAT, and the two things blocking Stage 2

L2BEAT classes OP Mainnet as a Stage 1 optimistic rollup, a rating it first gave on 10 June 2024. Stage 1 means users are protected by working proofs, but a council can still overrule the system. Stage 2, where code rules and a council can only fix bugs that are proven onchain, is blocked by two findings on L2BEAT’s page as of 27 October 2026: upgrades that are not bug fixes give users less than 30 days to leave, and the Security Council’s powers are not limited to onchain-provable bugs.

The first finding is the one users feel. L2BEAT rates the exit window as “None” and writes: “There is no delay on regular upgrades.” A regular upgrade goes through review by a Developer Advisory Board and a seven-day window in which the Token House can veto it, then needs the signatures of both the Optimism Foundation and the Security Council. Once both sign, it takes effect at once, so a user who disagrees has no time to withdraw first.

The OP Stack and the Superchain after Base left

The OP Stack is the code behind OP Mainnet, released for anyone to copy. Chains that adopted the standard setup joined the Superchain: they agreed to share upgrades, accept Optimism governance and hand a cut of their sequencer income to the Collective. L2BEAT counts ten chains besides OP Mainnet whose contracts answer to the same upgrade owner, among them Unichain, Soneium, World Chain, Ink, Celo and Lisk.

Base was the largest of them by far. DL News reported on 19 February 2026 that Base had shared 15% of its revenue with the Collective, 8,387 ETH in total, or about $16.4 million at that day’s prices. That came to 41% of everything the Collective had ever earned and 90% of its income in January 2026.

On 18 February the Base engineering team announced that it would merge its software into a single stack run by Base and move away from the OP Stack “over the coming months”. It plans six smaller hard forks a year instead of three, and Optimism’s seat among the signers of the Base Security Council goes to an extra independent signer. It also wrote: “we will remain compatible with the OP Stack specification.” The post did not mention revenue sharing. DL News reported the next day that Coinbase would stop sharing revenue, and that OP lost about a quarter of its value on the news. “This is a hit to near-term onchain revenues,” OP Labs chief executive Jing Wang told the outlet.

Base also stays a customer. An Optimism spokesperson told DL News that the company would keep serving Base as an OP Enterprise customer while it built its own infrastructure. On 12 March, Decrypt reported that OP Labs had laid off 20 employees. Wang wrote that “this is not about finances” and that the company had years of runway.

OP Enterprise: managed chains for banks, brokers and exchanges

OP Enterprise is now what the optimism.io homepage sells first. It runs chains for clients: sequencers, RPC endpoints, monitoring and incident response, with a 99.9% uptime promise on fully managed chains and 99.95% on a “mission-critical” tier. The homepage names Giwa, the chain of Korean exchange Upbit, Vision from Bitpanda, Sony’s Soneium, Kraken’s Ink, ether.fi and Celo as users. Recent announcements are a memorandum with Meritz Securities on 21 October 2026 and work with KB Securities and Securitize in September. Optimism also says OP Stack chains process about 800 million transactions a month, a figure it publishes itself and that Coindaro has not checked.

The most concrete case is Unichain, the chain of Uniswap Labs. Uniswap said on 9 October 2026 that Unichain moves to OP Enterprise, with its testnet migrating on 13 October and its mainnet on 29 October. “Chain ID, contracts, balances, and apps stay the same,” the post says. Unichain stays Stage 1, keeps its upgrades under Optimism governance and the Security Council, and gets first access to native interop. Our Uniswap project page covers the exchange behind it.

Native interop: ETH transfers first, no date yet

Interop is the old Superchain promise: chains that pass messages and assets to each other without a third-party bridge. The contracts shipped with Upgrade 16 on 25 July 2025, after reviews by Spearbit, Cantina and Wonderland, and have never been switched on. A forum post of 22 October 2026 narrowed the first release to native ETH transfers between Unichain and OP Mainnet. ERC-20 tokens, shared liquidity and other chains are left for later. Upgrade 21 is meant to add an ETH lockbox and prepare settlement on Ethereum; a separate proposal with the activation date had not been filed as of 26 October. The post adds that the plan is “subject to final technical readiness and governance approval”.

Optimism history: from Plasma research to the Superchain

Optimism grew out of Plasma Group, a non-profit that researched Ethereum scaling, according to The Block. Andreessen Horowitz led a $25 million Series A announced on 24 February 2021. The network soft-launched in January 2021 for a whitelist of apps such as Synthetix and Uniswap, and let anyone deploy from 16 December 2021. In March 2022 Paradigm and Andreessen Horowitz co-led a $150 million Series B at a $1.65 billion valuation. The Optimism Foundation and OP Labs, the main software company, run the project today.

The OP token launched with a first airdrop on 31 May 2022, to 248,699 eligible addresses. On 8 June the Foundation said about 20 million OP were gone. They were a temporary grant from its Partner Fund to market maker Wintermute, for liquidity. Wintermute had given a multisig address that existed on Ethereum but not yet on Optimism, and an attacker deployed his own multisig at that address first. Wintermute chief executive Evgeny Gaevoy wrote that “the initial error is 100% Wintermute’s fault”, The Block reported; the Foundation made a second 20 million OP grant.

Date	Event
6 Jun 2023	Bedrock rewrite of the OP Stack goes live
12 Feb 2024	Security Council introduced (L2BEAT)
14 Mar 2024	Ecotone hard fork: data posted as Ethereum blobs
10 Jun 2024	Permissionless fault proofs; Stage 1 on L2BEAT
17 Aug to 12 Sep 2024	Fault proofs fall back to permissioned mode, restored with Granite
9 Jan 2025	Holocene hard fork
9 May 2025	Isthmus hard fork
25 Jul 2025	Upgrade 16: interop contracts deployed, not active
2 Dec 2025	Jovian hard fork
28 Jan 2026	Vote on the OP buyback pilot closes
18 Feb 2026	Base announces it will leave the OP Stack
12 Mar 2026	OP Labs lays off 20 employees (Decrypt)
8 Jul 2026	Karst hard fork, after the Kona proof switch of 25 June
20 Aug 2026	546.9 million OP moved to a Strategic Ecosystem Fund
24 Sep 2026	Upgrade 20: super-root dispute games
22 Oct 2026	Interop plan and Security Council proposal published

The OP token: 4.29 billion supply, governance votes and no fee claim

OP had a fixed genesis supply of 4,294,967,296 tokens, 2 to the power of 32. According to Tokenomist, about 2.29 billion were in circulation on 27 October 2026, and about 53% of the total was unlocked. The Foundation’s budget update of June 2024 gives the original split:

Allocation	OP	Share
Retroactive public goods funding	858,993,459	20%
Ecosystem Fund (governance, partner, seed funds and reserve)	1,073,741,824	25%
User airdrops	816,043,786	19%
Core contributors	810,329,332	19%
Investors	735,858,894	17%

Two allocations matter most now. Investors and core contributors, 36% together, receive their tokens over several years: Tokenomist shows the schedule running into 2029, with the next unlock on 10 January 2027 from the Seed Fund (the amount is not shown). The airdrop pool changed in August 2026: a governance vote moved 546.9 million OP, about 12.7% of supply, out of future user airdrops into a Strategic Ecosystem Fund run by the Foundation. According to CoinMarketCap Academy, a vote of 8.486 million OP from the delegate Test in Prod, cast about 17 minutes before the 20 August close, lifted approval from 45.77% to 61.84%. Optimism says 269.1 million OP went out over five airdrop rounds and that no more are planned.

The design also allows new minting of up to 2% of supply a year. L2BEAT notes that this option has never been used, and on 29 October 2025 it logged an empty mint that explicitly skipped a year of inflation. Coindaro found no decision setting a rate for 2026.

What holding OP gives you, and the buyback pilot

OP is a voting token. Holders vote in the Token House or delegate their votes. They do not pay fees with it and receive no share of sequencer income. The only link between Superchain revenue and the token is the buyback pilot proposed by the Foundation on 8 January 2026: 50% of incoming Superchain revenue converted into OP each month for a year, starting in February, with the bought tokens going to the treasury, where they could later be burned or paid as staking rewards.

CoinDesk reported that the vote ran from 22 to 28 January and that the Superchain had earned 5,868 ETH in sequencer revenue over the previous 12 months, so half would have been about 2,700 ETH. The Block reported that it passed with about 84% support and that purchases would start through over-the-counter swaps, which the Foundation called temporary. Three weeks later Base, which supplied 90% of January’s revenue, said it was leaving. Coindaro found no public figure for how much OP the pilot has bought, nor any decision on what happens after it ends in early 2027.

Governance: Token House, Security Council and the 22 October proposal

The Optimism Collective splits power between the Foundation and two houses. The Token House is open to any OP holder; an Optimism post of 10 September 2026 notes that a small number of delegates hold a large share of the delegated votes. The Citizens’ House approved the 2024 fault proofs alongside the Token House, and the buyback went to a Joint House vote with a 60% threshold. Its future is unclear: the Operating Manual update proposed on 22 October removes mentions of it.

The Security Council holds the upgrade keys together with the Foundation. L2BEAT describes a contract owner made of two signers, the Foundation and the Council, and the Council itself as a 13-member multisig that needs 10 signatures. Its charter sets a 75% threshold. Members serve staggered 12-month terms in two groups and, until now, the Token House elected them. The same pair of signers controls the ten other Superchain chains listed above.

On 22 October 2026 the Foundation posted for ratification a new Security Council Charter and Operating Manual. Under it, the Council Lead would nominate members, and “a nominee is seated unless 20% of active votable OP supply vetoes that nominee.” The text also says: “Elections for Security Council cohorts are discontinued.” The only reply on the governance forum by 26 October, from delegate cp0x, argued that such decisions “should rest on explicit votes rather than on silence.” No vote date has been published. Our news piece covers the proposal to end Security Council elections clause by clause.

This is where the missing exit window bites. A regular upgrade takes effect the moment two signers agree, so the people behind those signatures are the main protection users have, and the proposal changes how one of the two is chosen.

Optimism in numbers as of 27 October 2026

L2BEAT counted about $1.71 billion of value secured on OP Mainnet on 27 October, down 14.7% in seven days; OP tokens made up 14.8% of it. DefiLlama, which counts only money in apps, puts OP Mainnet far behind Base and Arbitrum:

Metric	Figure	Source
L2BEAT stage, OP Mainnet	Stage 1 (two Stage 2 requirements missing)	L2BEAT
Total value secured, OP Mainnet	$1.71 billion	L2BEAT
App TVL, OP Mainnet	$422.6 million	DefiLlama
App TVL, Arbitrum	$1.51 billion	DefiLlama
App TVL, Base	$6.08 billion	DefiLlama
OP circulating supply	About 2.29 billion of 4.29 billion	Tokenomist
Security Council threshold	10 of 13 signers	L2BEAT
Superchain revenue, 12 months to January 2026	5,868 ETH	CoinDesk, 22 January 2026

Revenue for OP Mainnet alone in 2026 is not published in a form Coindaro could verify.

Optimism vs Arbitrum: same design, different weight

Arbitrum and OP Mainnet are both optimistic rollups on Ethereum rated Stage 1 by L2BEAT, and neither token receives fees. Where they part is size and strategy. On DefiLlama’s count, apps on Arbitrum hold about 3.6 times as much as apps on OP Mainnet. Base, which is leaving the OP Stack, holds about four times as much as Arbitrum. Optimism’s plan rests on other chains running its code and paying it, and its biggest such chain has gone. Readers new to these networks can start with our guide to layer 1 and layer 2, which explains why rollups exist at all. For OP holders the open question is whether managed enterprise chains bring in enough revenue to replace what Base paid.

Who builds Optimism: team, funding and audits

Jinglan (Jing) Wang is a co-founder and the chief executive of OP Labs. Coindaro found no official page that lists the other founders or their roles in 2026, so no one else is named here. The project has disclosed $175 million in venture funding over two rounds, and its investors received 17% of the initial OP supply.

Security work is public. The security-reviews folder of the main Optimism GitHub repository held 48 reports on 27 October 2026, from a Trail of Bits review of October 2020 to Cantina’s review of Upgrade 20 in August 2026. They include a Sherlock contest on fault proofs in 2024 and Spearbit and Cantina reviews of the proof system that August. The proof fallback of August 2024 came after those reviews. Optimism advertises a $2 million bug bounty, a figure it states itself.

Optimism risks: upgrade keys, revenue and supply

Coindaro rates Optimism 3 on a scale of 1 (lowest) to 5. The network has been live since 2021, its code has been reviewed 48 times, and permissionless fault proofs have been back on since September 2024. The rating stays in the middle because of how much depends on a few signers and on a revenue model that lost its largest payer.

• Upgrades have no exit window: once the Foundation and the Security Council both sign after the seven-day veto period, a change applies at once (L2BEAT).
• The Council may soon be appointed rather than elected, with silence counting as approval unless 20% of active OP votes against a nominee.
• One sequencer orders transactions; forced inclusion through Ethereum can take up to 12 hours.
• Base supplied most of the Collective’s income and stopped sharing it in 2026, which leaves the buyback with a much smaller base.
• OP has no claim on fees, and unlocks continue into 2029, with minting of up to 2% a year possible by vote.
• Voting power is concentrated: a single delegate decided the August 2026 fund vote, and the Foundation controls 546.9 million OP in the new fund.

Two past incidents belong here too: the 20 million OP lost through the Wintermute address in June 2022, and the four weeks without permissionless proofs in 2024.

What to watch on Optimism into 2027

The first date is 29 October 2026, when Unichain’s mainnet is scheduled to move to OP Enterprise. Then come the governance proposal setting an activation date for ETH interop between Unichain and OP Mainnet, and Upgrade 21, neither of which has a date. The Security Council proposal still needs a vote date, and a Lead election would follow it. The buyback pilot reaches the end of its year in early 2027, and the Seed Fund unlock falls on 10 January 2027. The Lagoon hard fork is listed by the docs as not scheduled.

Stage 2 has been the stated goal since June 2024. It would need a 30-day exit window and a Council limited to proven bugs, and the 22 October proposal does not address either.