Original: DL News
Translation: PANews
Leading cryptocurrency exchanges in the United States are completely overhauling their nearly three-year partnership with layer 2 (L2) developers: the Base blockchain, under Coinbase, will now use self-developed code and will no longer rely on Optimism's OP Stack.
A spokesperson for Optimism confirmed that Coinbase will stop sharing Base chain revenue with the Optimism alliance. During their collaboration, this revenue share has accumulated to over $16 million.
“This is a blow to on-chain short-term revenue,” OP Labs CEO Jing Wang stated on the X platform, “but as the crypto community has long said, we need to upgrade our business model.”
She added that Coinbase will continue to collaborate as a client of OP Labs' “OP enterprise services.”
Base's “going solo” has directly impacted the price of the Optimism token OP. Since Wednesday, OP has plummeted by a quarter, trading at just below $0.14 at the time of publication, far below the historical high of $4.84 set in 2024.
For a long time, Coinbase has shared 15% of Base's revenue with the digital cooperative organization Optimism alliance that manages the OP Stack. To date, Base has contributed 8,387 Ethereum, equivalent to approximately $16.4 million based on Wednesday's price.
This amount accounts for 41% of the total historical revenue of the Optimism alliance. In recent months, Base's contribution to revenue has sharply increased, reaching 90% in January.
Therefore, this change could have a significant impact on the Superchain. The Superchain is a blockchain alliance built on the OP Stack, including 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' request for comments.
“We appreciate the three years of cooperation with Base and are proud to have helped it become one of the most successful layer 2 networks in history,” an Optimism spokesperson stated in a statement to DL News. “Our focus remains on providing enterprise-level blockchain infrastructure for the ecosystem and we will continue to serve Base as an OP enterprise client while they build an independent technical architecture.”
“Disappointing”
The private company OP Labs has raised over $175 million from firms like 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 alliance.
The affiliated entity Optimism Foundation recently stated it would transfer some responsibilities for funding OP Labs operations to the alliance.
Contributions from Superchain members are denominated in Ethereum. This multi-million dollar crypto asset was initially idle, and the alliance issued grants in OP tokens aimed at attracting developers to the Superchain – more developers mean more applications, and more applications lead to more users.
However, Optimism has recently begun to utilize these Ethereum assets: last March, the alliance approved using most of the Ethereum for staking to earn passive income; just last month, the alliance also passed a buyback plan that ties the value of OP tokens to the development of the Superchain. Half of the alliance's revenue will be used to buy back OP, while the foundation is authorized to manage the other half of the funds.
Why Create a Superchain?
“This is disappointing, but in many ways, it was also expected,” said PaperImperium, an anonymous member of the Optimism alliance representative agency GFX Labs, to DL News, “Base must be accountable to its shareholders and do what is in their best interest.”
The OP Stack is open-source code, meaning anyone can use it for free without obtaining permission from Optimism.
“So, why do chains like Base, Mode, Worldcoin, Zora, and other public chains in the Superchain choose to share revenue?” Optimism wrote in a blog in 2024, “The answer lies in that this network structure is designed to benefit the entire alliance.”
The upgrade of the OP Stack was originally planned to integrate the various members of the Superchain from isolated blockchain alliances into a unified, interoperable network. “Unfortunately, this vision has not been realized despite years of technical development,” PaperImperium said.
Coinbase stated that this move is to accelerate the pace of upgrades, simplify code, and test functionalities that may land on Ethereum in the future.
“Without the top-notch technical support behind OP Stack, we could not have reached today so quickly; we thank our collaboration over the past three years,” Coinbase stated in a blog.
When Base first connected to Optimism in 2023, it was qualified to earn a maximum of 118 million OP tokens over six years. It is currently unclear how many tokens Base has claimed and how the remaining portion will be handled.
On Wednesday, Optimism also received good news: the Ethereum staking protocol Ether.fi announced it would migrate its crypto credit card business from the layer 2 network Scroll to the OP mainnet.
“In the coming months, about 70,000 active cards, 300,000 accounts, and millions of dollars of user locked funds (TVL) will migrate to Optimism,” Optimism stated in a blog, “This will position the OP mainnet as a leading public chain in the payment sector.”
As for Coinbase, Wang stated that because Base is still using code developed by Optimism, it will continue to order OP Labs' “OP enterprise: mission-critical” services. “If Base changes too much so that it is no longer the original OP stack, then they will no longer need our mission-critical support,” she wrote.
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