Optimism Foundation offered 25M OP tokens to attract Kraken’s L2 to the Superchain

Cover art/illustration via CryptoSlate. Image includes combined content which may include AI-generated content.

Optimism Foundation and Kraken closed a 25 million OP deal to bring the exchange’s new layer-2 (L2) blockchain, Ink, to the Superchain ecosystem.

According to CryptoSlate data, the deal is worth $43 million at OP’s current price of $1.72.

Grant

Optimism Foundation’s chief growth officer, Ryan Wyatt, explained that the grant is structured to fund Kraken’s protocol engineering and incentivize major transaction milestones.

The 25 million tokens are split into two segments: five million $OP tokens will support engineering efforts specific to the OP Stack, while the remaining 20 million are earmarked for achieving transaction benchmarks that would generate substantial fees for the OP Collective.

According to Wyatt, the remaining 20 million tokens will be paid out as “massive transaction milestones” are met. The aim is to drive fees to the Optimism Collective, giving the deal a positive return on investment.

Wyatt also highlighted that this deal was also offered to other crypto firms that deployed blockchains using Optimism’s infrastructure, such as Coinbase’s L2 blockchain Base.

Tokens paid as grants

The foundation has emphasized that the grant represents more than simple deployment costs, typically estimated at under $3,000 per month.

According to Wyatt:

“They [Kraken] will contribute to protocol engineering and development of the OP Stack, committing to interoperability, Superchain ERC-20 standards, and broader ecosystem goals.”

He clarified that Kraken’s work would include deep integration efforts to strengthen the OP Stack’s potential across the DeFi sector.

Wyatt also shared a public document detailing OP token allocations, which shows nearly 480 million OP tokens committed to “Partner fund + seed fund + Unallocated.” He further vowed that “transparency will continue to increase.”

Another CEX-backed L2

Kraken announced its Ethereum L2 on Oct. 24 and said the network will be a general-use network like Base. 

According to the announcement, the Superchain was chosen to satisfy Ink’s ambition to be an interoperable blockchain while maintaining Ethereum’s (ETH) underlying security as a layer-1 blockchain.

Base, the only layer-2 blockchain deployed on Superchain by a centralized exchange until now, has been very successful. It crossed $2 billion in total value locked (TVL) in late September and sits at $2.7 billion as of Oct. 29, becoming the largest Ethereum L2 by TVL, per DefiLlama data.