Written by: Thejaswini M A

Translated by: Luffy, Foresight News

The story of Optimism could have had a resounding victory version.

In that version, OP Stack became the default infrastructure for Ethereum scaling, with dozens of well-funded chains joining Superchain, revenue flowing back to Collective, interoperability features launched smoothly, and the entire ecosystem compounding continuously, looking from afar like a brand new form of the internet: it does not belong to anyone, everyone co-governs and self-sustains.

This version is not a fantasy. For a while, it really seemed like it was about to happen. The problem is: everything Optimism did to achieve this vision made it impossible to protect that vision.

OP Stack is released under the MIT open-source license. The importance of this decision almost surpasses any other choice made by Optimism, so it is necessary to clarify its meaning: MIT is currently the most permissive general open-source license, allowing anyone to take the code, develop it further, modify it, commercialize it, or even fork it completely. No royalties, no revenue sharing, no obligations—you don't even need to say thank you.

Optimism made this choice deliberately. The logic is simple: if you want to be the default framework, you have to eliminate every reason not to adopt yours. Bring the integration cost to zero, make the protocol undisputed, allowing any team, company, or exchange with a development budget to start an OP Stack chain with one click, without permission or signing any documents.

It succeeded. By mid-2025, OP Stack handled 69.9% of L2 transaction fees, and 34 chains had gone live on the mainnet. Coinbase, Uniswap, Kraken, Sony, Worldcoin are all using it. When people talk about Ethereum scaling, they usually refer to things built on top of Optimism's code.

Optimism won the standards battle.

Then, the largest chain it helped build announced that it no longer needed that relationship.

On February 18, 2026, Coinbase published a blog post with cautious and friendly wording, typical of the company announcing significant events while trying not to sound harsh. The Base chain would integrate the codebase, accelerate the development cycle, and reduce coordination costs. The article expressed gratitude and praised the collaboration.

As soon as the news broke, the OP token plummeted 28% within 48 hours, with a 157% spike in sell volume. Within just a few days, the token had dropped 89.8% compared to a year ago, now standing at only $0.12, while the peak in March 2024 was $4.85. OP Labs CEO Jing Wang wrote on X, "This is a blow to short-term on-chain revenue."

To understand the reasons, you must realize what Superchain is really selling.

OP Stack is free. The protocol makes this permanent and irrevocable. So why would chains be willing to share revenue with the Optimism Collective? Optimism's answer is: interoperability. Once you join Superchain, your chain is not just a single chain; it becomes part of a unified network—liquidity and users can flow freely between all member chains, developing on one chain is equivalent to developing on all chains, achieving a 1+1>2 effect.

This is its value proposition: pay 2.5% of total revenue or 15% of net profit, and in return, you gain something that no single chain can build alone.

But interoperability has never been launched.

Optimism originally planned to launch native interoperability on the mainnet in early 2025, but that did not happen. A long-time governance representative stated: "Despite years of technical development, unfortunately, this has not been realized."

Members are paying "taxes," while the products that this money was supposed to support remain theoretical. What Superchain actually provides is just shared branding, shared governance costs, and a revenue obligation. And what makes this obligation worth paying always feels "just out of reach." Meanwhile, Base continues to grow.

By January 2026, Base contributed 96.5% of all Gas fees flowing into the Optimism Collective, almost the entire amount. Base's transaction volume was about 4 times that of OP Mainnet, while its DEX transaction volume was about 144 times, and Gas fee production was 80 times. During the partnership, the Collective received around 14,000 ETH in total over its lifecycle, with Base contributing 8,387 ETH, and its monthly income share approaching 100%.

Another 33 Superchain members may be on the list, but they are economically insignificant. In the first half of 2025, the second most active member, World Chain, accounted for only 11.5% of Superchain's calculated total, while OP Mainnet itself accounted for 11.4%, and Ink, Soneium, and Unichain combined accounted for less than 13%.

Superchain has effectively become the ecosystem of one chain, rather than a coalition. The alliance is real on paper but is entirely based on Base economically.

In any alliance, as it develops to a certain stage, the strongest participants ask that obvious question: what do I actually get out of this?

Almost every successful open-source story plays out the same logic. MongoDB built a widely used database, released it as open source, and then watched AWS build a profitable hosting service on top of it without paying a dime. AWS controls traffic distribution, MongoDB established the standard, and value flows to the entity controlling the users, rather than the one writing the code. MongoDB eventually modified its license, while AWS forked it into OpenSearch.

Elastic and Redis have also gone through the same cycle. The details differ, but the structure is entirely the same: infrastructure makers set standards, giants with distribution capabilities adopt them, the giants harvest value, and eventually the giants internalize the tech stack and depart.

Optimism is the encrypted version of this story.

Arbitrum understood this logic and made different choices. The Orbit chain, which corresponds to Superchain, uses the Business Source License, where revenue sharing is based on contractual obligations rather than voluntary terms. When your largest partner can leave without legal consequences, the survival of the alliance entirely depends on their willingness to stay. Arbitrum does not want to build an ecosystem based on this assumption.

Base's official reason for leaving is technical: a unified codebase means faster development, with goals increasing from 3 major upgrades per year to 6; independent control of the security committee means no external entity can delay or block network decisions; reducing dependencies means Base can keep up with Ethereum's own upgrade pace without waiting for governance processes beyond its control.

Coordinating across multiple codebases is indeed slower than independently controlling a tech stack.

But there’s another reason that doesn't need elaboration. Morgan Stanley estimates that the Base token could bring about $34 billion in equity value to Coinbase and raised its target price to $404. As long as Base continues to pay 15% of its net profit to the external protocol’s Collective, designing a Base token with reliable value capture capability becomes structurally very difficult. Leaving Superchain is the prerequisite, not a side effect. The two motivations point in the same direction, and Base indeed did that.

What Optimism has left is not nothing, but it must face the changes that have already occurred honestly.

OP Mainnet still holds $1.5 billion in TVL. On the very day Base announced its departure, ether.fi stated it would migrate its on-chain credit card product to OP Mainnet, bringing 70,000 active cards, 300,000 accounts, and over $160 million in TVL. Just weeks prior, the Collective had initiated a buyback plan, using 50% of the sequencer income for monthly OP repurchases.

The collaboration with ether.fi brought clearer use cases for OP Mainnet in the consumer payment space. However, ether.fi's annual fee contribution is only about $13 million, while Base alone is projected to generate $55 million in profit in 2025. The revenue base upon which the buyback plan relied has vanished. Token unlocks for investors and contributors continue at a scale of about $32 million monthly.

Pivoting to enterprise services may be the correct step. OP Labs has raised over $175 million, has top engineering talent, and there is real demand from institutions for managed OP Stack deployments, which want to launch chains without the desire to build maintenance capabilities themselves. Jing Wang positions it as the "Databricks of blockchain infrastructure," a reasonable analogy. This is a service business, and it can work.

But a service business is fundamentally different from a network generating compound protocol revenue through an alliance. The valuation of the OP token was originally priced for the latter. Within 12 hours of the blog post's release, the market has already understood this.

Broaden the perspective. What happened on February 18 is essentially not just about Optimism.

For most of 2024, over 50 L2 networks are competing for users and liquidity. By the end of 2025, Base, Arbitrum, and Optimism together processed nearly 90% of L2 transactions, with Base alone surpassing 60%. The activity of small Rollups has declined by 61% since June. The Dencun upgrade brings a 90% reduction in fees, compressing profitability across the entire industry. Base is the only L2 to achieve profitability in 2025.

Chains that survive, and those that will define this tier in the coming years may not necessarily be the most technically proficient. They are the chains that have structural reasons for user retention. Chains with exchange backgrounds (Base, Ink, Mantle) leverage the distribution capabilities from their parent companies' existing user bases, where each Coinbase user wanting to enter a chain only needs one click to get to Base. DeFi-native chains like Arbitrum and Hyperliquid rely on liquidity depths that are difficult to replicate elsewhere to maintain their positions.

Technology can be forked. OP Stack exemplifies this perfectly. What cannot be forked is the relationship between Coinbase and its 100 million users, or Arbitrum's tens of billions in open positions. Lasting value resides here, and is almost unrelated to which protocol you choose for your codebase.

Optimism's decision to release OP Stack under a permissive open-source license is the right choice. It has brought the most widespread adoption within the L2 framework, making Optimism the standard infrastructure for an entire generation of Ethereum scaling. Without this decision, Base might have been built on other technology or might not have emerged at all.

However, the decision that made all this possible also made exit effortless. Once Base grew large enough to have its own users, its own token roadmap, and its own reasons to pursue complete sovereignty over infrastructure, there are no constraints in the protocol, and the promise of interoperability is insufficient to leave it behind.

Optimism won the standard war. But this standard did not come with a mechanism to capture the value it created. The token price of $0.12 is the market's final valuation of all this value.