Is Optimism's 'Superchain' Winning the Ethereum Layer-2 Race?
One of the biggest trends of 2023 among the leading layer-2 projects on Ethereum was the emergence of “blockchain in a box,” where teams encouraged developers to clone their code to spin up new layer 2s. Now, one project in particular, Optimism, appears to be pulling away as the clear leader.
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Optimism Foundation Chief Growth Officer Ryan Wyatt (Optimism Foundation)
One of the biggest trends of 2023 among the leading layer-2 projects on Ethereum was the emergence of “blockchain in a box,” where the teams encouraged developers to clone their code to spin up new layer 2s.
Now, one project in particular appears to be pulling away as the clear leader. And as is often the case in blockchain development, a crucial factor is the money changing hands behind the scenes.
Optimism, one of the major layer-2 networks, has managed to get a slew of clients and firms to deploy their own blockchains using Optimism’s technology, with the OP Stack, under open-source software licenses.
It's a crucial development in the evolution of the broader blockchain universe, since layer-2 networks stand at the heart of developers' efforts to make transactions faster and cheaper in the Ethereum ecosystem. Ethereum, while the second-largest blockchain after Bitcoin, is currently the leading smart-contracts network — meaning it can handle programs and support applications — and it has become the dominant home for decentralized exchanges and lending platforms. Layer-2 blockchains work like auxiliary networks atop Ethereum, providing a venue for transactions to be executed quickly and at a low cost, and then settled down to the base chain.
Part of the Optimism Foundation's strategy to get new networks to use their technology is to give out large sums of OP tokens in the form of grants. Officials within the Optimism ecosystem claim that those tokens are supposed to help different projects kickstart their building on OP Stack while contributing to Optimism’s Superchain, a network of OP chains that are connected amongst each other, as well as to Optimism’s governance system, which is known as the Collective.
Ultimately, the goal is to reach critical mass — perhaps not unlike the ascendance in the 1980s of VHS over Betamax as the dominant videotape technology.
Kraken's OP token grant
The deal with Kraken came with a sizable grant, which included an allocation of 25 million OP tokens, worth about $42.5 million when CoinDesk broke the news recently. Kraken's network is called “Ink.”
Representatives for World (the recently renamed Worldcoin project), Uniswap and Sony all declined to comment on how many tokens their projects received as part of their packages, but according to Kraken’s Andrew Koller, the creator of Ink, other OP Stack participants also got sizable amounts.
Optimism Foundation officials say they leave it up to the projects to disclose the amounts of their grants.
In an industry that prides itself on transparency, the unwillingness to share how many OP tokens are designated to those chains raises some questions on how big of a factor those grants played into those deals.
A spokesperson with the Optimism Foundation shared with CoinDesk that the Optimism ecosystem has been transparent about their treasury, and that the Kraken deal falls under their “partnerships fund,” which goes “to certain projects to help support initial development of the chain.”
Optimism's Treasury and Grant Breakdown
According to the data as of Sept. 30, there are about 841 million OP tokens designated towards that kind of funding, with just under 480 million OP tokens already committed. That works out to 361 million remaining, or nearly $480 million at the current OP token price of $1.32.
Some smaller projects building layer 2s on the OP Stack have also received tokens. Celo’s governance forum previously disclosed that it would receive up to 6.5 million OP tokens for building on OP Stack, and the Bitcoin-focused BOB project shared that it was still in the negotiating process, but at the time of writing the deal was for about 500,000 OP tokens.
