Optimism launched its mainnet in January 2021, making it one of the first Ethereum L2s alongside Arbitrum. Founded by Jinglan Wang, Karl Floersch, and Kevin Ho, Optimism took a different strategic path than its competitor: instead of trying to capture all L2 activity on a single chain, Optimism open-sourced its OP Stack and encouraged other projects to build L2s using its technology, forming a network of interoperable chains called the “Superchain.”
The OP token airdropped in June 2022, rewarding Ethereum power users and governance participants. Multiple subsequent airdrops followed, making Optimism one of the most generous protocols in terms of community token distribution. The Optimism Collective — the protocol’s governance structure — allocated hundreds of millions of dollars to “retroactive public goods funding,” paying developers who built open-source tools that benefited the Ethereum ecosystem.
The Superchain thesis gained massive validation when Coinbase chose the OP Stack for Base in 2023. Suddenly, the biggest crypto company in the US was running on Optimism’s technology. Worldcoin, Zora, Mode, and dozens of other chains followed. Each OP Stack chain contributed sequencer revenue back to the Optimism Collective, creating a flywheel: more chains → more revenue → more public goods funding → better infrastructure → more chains.
By 2025, the Superchain had more combined TVL and transaction volume than any single L2 chain. Optimism’s bet — that winning the L2 wars meant winning the infrastructure layer rather than the application layer — was looking increasingly correct. Arbitrum had more native TVL, but Optimism’s technology powered more chains total. The question of whether “one big L2” or “many interoperable L2s” is the right model may define Ethereum’s scaling trajectory for the next decade.
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