Written by: Thejaswini M A
Compiled by: Luffy, Foresight News
The Optimism storybook could have a hugely successful version.
In that version, the OP Stack became the default infrastructure for Ethereum scaling, dozens of well-funded chains joined the Superchain, revenue flowed back to the Collective, interoperability features launched smoothly, and the entire ecosystem continued to compound—seen from afar, it resembled an entirely new form of the internet: owned by no one, governed by all, and self-sustaining.
This version is not a fantasy. There was a time when it truly seemed imminent. The problem is that everything Optimism has done to achieve this vision has also made protecting it impossible.
The OP Stack is released under the MIT open-source license. This decision is more significant than any other choice Optimism has made, so it’s essential to clarify its implications: MIT is currently the most permissive general-purpose open-source license. Anyone can use the code, modify it, develop derivatives, commercialize it, or even create a full fork—without paying royalties, sharing revenue, or fulfilling any 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 must eliminate every reason not to use it. Reduce the integration cost to zero, make the protocol uncontroversial, and allow any team, company, or exchange with a development budget to launch an OP Stack chain with a single click—no permission required, no documents to sign.
It succeeded. By mid-2025, the OP Stack handled 69.9% of L2 transaction fees, with 34 chains live on mainnet. Coinbase, Uniswap, Kraken, Sony, and Worldcoin are all using it. When people talk about Ethereum scaling, they often mean solutions built on Optimism’s code.
Optimism won the standards battle.
Then, the largest chain it once helped build announced it no longer needed this relationship.
On February 18, 2026, Coinbase published a blog post with a carefully worded and warm tone—a typical style the company uses when announcing major developments without sounding abrupt. The Base chain will integrate codebases, accelerate development cycles, and reduce coordination costs. The post expressed gratitude and celebrated collaboration.
Immediately after the news broke, the OP token plunged 28% within 48 hours, with selling volume surging 157%. Within just a few days, the token had dropped 89.8% from its level a year ago, trading at only $0.12 at the time of writing, compared to its March 2024 high of $4.85. OP Labs CEO Jing Wang wrote on X: “This is a blow to short-term on-chain revenue.”
To understand why, you must understand what Superchain is truly selling.
The OP Stack is free. The protocol ensures this is permanent and irrevocable. So why would any chain share revenue with Optimism Collective? Optimism’s answer is interoperability. By joining the Superchain, your chain becomes part of a unified network—liquidity and users can flow freely across all member chains, and developing on one chain is equivalent to developing on all of them, creating 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 access to something no single chain could build on its own.
However, interoperability was never launched.
Optimism had planned to launch native interoperability on mainnet in early 2025, but it did not materialize. A long-standing governance representative stated: "Despite years of technical development, unfortunately, this has not been achieved."
Members are paying "taxes," yet the products these funds are meant to support remain theoretical. Superchain actually provides only a shared brand, shared governance costs, and an obligation to generate revenue—while the thing that makes this obligation worthwhile is always "just around the corner." Meanwhile, Base continues to grow.
By January 2026, Base contributed 96.5% of all gas fees flowing into the Optimism Collective—nearly all of it. Base’s transaction volume was approximately four times that of OP Mainnet, DEX trading volume about 144 times higher, and gas fee output 80 times greater. During the period of their collaboration, the Collective received a total of approximately 14,000 ETH over its lifetime, with Base contributing 8,387 ETH, and its monthly revenue share steadily approaching 100%.
Another 33 Superchain members, while listed, are economically insignificant. In the first half of 2025, the second-most active member, World Chain, accounted for only 11.5% of the Superchain’s total compute, with OP Mainnet itself at 11.4%, and Ink, Soneium, and Unichain combined under 13%.
Beyond its name, Superchain has effectively become an ecosystem centered around a single chain. While the alliance exists on paper, economically it is entirely Base.
In any alliance, as it develops to a certain stage, the strongest participant inevitably asks the obvious question: What have I actually gained from this?
In nearly every successful open-source story, the same logic plays out: MongoDB built a widely used database, released it as open source, then watched as AWS built a profitable managed service on top of it without paying anything. AWS controls traffic distribution, MongoDB set the standard, and value flows to the entity that controls users, not the one that wrote the code. MongoDB eventually changed its license, and AWS forked it into OpenSearch.
Elastic and Redis have also gone through the same cycle. The details differ, but the structure is identical: infrastructure creators establish standards, giants with distribution capabilities adopt them, the giants capture value, and ultimately internalize the technology stack and move on.
Optimism is the crypto version of this story.
Arbitrum understood this logic and made a different choice. Its Orbit chains, positioned as an alternative to Superchain, use the Business Source license, with revenue sharing contractually mandated rather than voluntary. When your largest partner can leave without legal consequences, the alliance’s survival depends entirely on their willingness to stay. Arbitrum does not want to build its ecosystem on this assumption.
Base's official reason for leaving is technical: unifying the codebase enables faster development, increasing the target frequency of major upgrades from three to six per year; independently controlling the security committee means no external entity can delay or block network decisions; and reducing dependencies allows Base to keep pace with Ethereum’s own upgrades without waiting for governance processes outside its control.
Coordinating across multiple codebases is indeed slower than managing your own tech stack.
But there is another reason,无需赘述. Morgan Stanley estimates that the Base token could bring Coinbase approximately $34 billion in equity value, raising its price target to $404. As long as Base continues to pay 15% of net profits to the Collective of external protocols, structuring a Base token with reliable value capture remains extremely difficult. Leaving the Superchain is a prerequisite, not a side effect. Both motivations point in the same direction, and Base has indeed done so.
What remains for Optimism is not nothing, but we must honestly confront the changes that have already occurred.
OP Mainnet still holds $1.5 billion in TVL. On the same 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. A few weeks ago, Collective implemented a buyback program allocating 50% of sequencer revenues toward monthly OP repurchases.
ether.fi's partnership has brought clearer use cases for OP Mainnet in the consumer payments space. However, ether.fi's annual fee contribution amounts to only about $13 million, while Base generated $55 million in profit in 2025 alone. The revenue base underpinning the buyback program no longer exists. Token unlocks for investors and contributors continue at a monthly rate of approximately $32 million.
Transitioning to enterprise services may be the right step. OP Labs has raised over $175 million, boasts top-tier engineering talent, and there is genuine demand from institutions for managed OP Stack deployments—organizations that want to launch chains without building their own maintenance capabilities. Jing Wang has positioned it as the “Databricks of blockchain infrastructure,” a reasonable analogy. It’s a services business that can work.
But the service business is entirely different from the network that generates compounding protocol revenue through alliances. The OP token was originally valued for the latter. Less than 12 hours after the blog post was published, the market had already understood this.
Broaden your perspective. What happened on February 18 was fundamentally about more than just Optimism.
For most of 2024, over 50 L2 networks competed for users and liquidity. By the end of 2025, Base, Arbitrum, and Optimism accounted for nearly 90% of all L2 transactions, with Base alone exceeding 60%. Active usage of smaller rollups has declined by 61% since June. The Dencun upgrade triggered a 90% reduction in fees, compressing profit margins across the industry. Base was the only L2 to achieve profitability in 2025.
The chains that survive—and those that will define this layer in the coming years—are not necessarily the most technically advanced. They are the ones with structural reasons for user retention. Chains with exchange backgrounds (Base, Ink, Mantle) leverage their parent companies’ existing user bases for built-in distribution; every Coinbase user looking to enter a chain needs just one click to reach Base. Native DeFi chains like Arbitrum and Hyperliquid, on the other hand, maintain their positions by securing liquidity depth that cannot be easily replicated elsewhere.
Technology can be forked. The OP Stack proves this better than most. What cannot be forked is Coinbase’s relationship with its 100 million users, or Arbitrum’s billions of dollars in open interest. That’s where lasting value lies—largely unrelated to which protocol you choose for your codebase.
Optimism made the right choice by releasing the OP Stack under a permissive open-source license. It has led to the broadest adoption of any L2 framework, establishing Optimism as the infrastructure standard for an entire generation of Ethereum scaling. Without this decision, Base might have been built on different technology—or might not exist at all.
But the decision that made all of this possible also made exiting costless. When Base grows large enough to have its own users, its own token roadmap, and its own reasons to pursue full infrastructure sovereignty, there are no constraints within the protocol—and the promise of interoperability is not enough to give it a reason to stay.
Optimism won the standards war. However, this standard lacks a mechanism to capture the value it creates. A token price of $0.12 reflects the market’s final valuation of all this value.