What Is Optimism (OP) in Crypto?

In late May 2022 the Optimism Foundation sent 20 million OP tokens to an address supplied by Wintermute, the market maker it had hired to provide liquidity once the new token listed on exchanges. The address was genuine. The wallet behind it, though, existed only on Ethereum, and the tokens had gone out on Optimism's own network.

That wallet was a multisig, a smart contract that needs several keys to approve a transaction. An ordinary wallet address works on every Ethereum-style chain, because the same private key controls it everywhere, but a contract wallet has to be deployed on each chain separately. Nobody had deployed this one on Optimism, so the address held 20 million tokens and had no owner.

Wintermute told the Optimism team on 30 May and planned a recovery for 7 June, taking a fresh 20 million OP in the meantime against $50 million in USDC collateral so the launch could go ahead. Someone else moved first. The wallet had been created in 2020 through an older factory contract, which derived each new wallet's address from a running count, regardless of who the owners were. By 5 June an attacker had replayed that setup on Optimism and churned out wallets in batches of 162 until one landed on Wintermute's address, with the attacker as owner.

A million OP was sold almost immediately, and another million went to the public address of Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin. Then on 10 June, over 22 minutes, 17 million came back in 17 transfers of a million each, and the two million the attacker had sold or kept were written off as a bounty that Wintermute agreed to repay.

Outside crypto, optimism is a mood. Here the word covers a blockchain, a software kit, a token and a governance experiment, all under one collective, and the 2022 tangle involved two of them. None of this is financial advice, just a guide to how the parts fit.

OP Mainnet, the original chain

OP Mainnet is the project's own optimistic rollup on Ethereum. Until June 2023 it was just called Optimism, and the new name was meant to separate the blockchain from the wider project and its community. At first only approved teams such as Uniswap and Synthetix could deploy on it, a whitelist that came off on 16 December 2021.

Two upgrades did the most to shape it. Bedrock, completed on 6 June 2023, rebuilt the chain's software as separate modules, and that modular code is what other teams now reuse as the OP Stack. Permissionless fault proofs followed on 10 June 2024, so anyone can challenge an invalid withdrawal and starting one no longer needs a trusted party.

L2BEAT, the research site that grades rollups on how much they still depend on their operators, rates OP Mainnet Stage 1. The proofs work, but training wheels remain. A Security Council can still step in if the proof system fails, and withdrawing through the official bridge still takes about a week.

The traffic is real enough: in the week to 27 September 2026 L2BEAT logged about 1.8 million transactions a day on OP Mainnet, and on 28 September it put the value secured there at roughly $1.98 billion.

Why you still need ETH

The OP token does not pay for transactions on OP Mainnet. Fees there are charged in ETH, chiefly an execution fee calculated the same way as Ethereum's plus a data fee for posting the transaction back to Ethereum. Both come out of the sender's ETH balance on OP Mainnet itself.

So an ordinary wallet holding OP but no ETH on OP Mainnet is stuck until some ETH arrives, and ETH sitting on Ethereum's main chain does not count until it has been bridged across. Same lesson as Wintermute, smaller stakes: networks are separate places.

OP is for voting.

The OP Stack and the Superchain

The OP Stack is the open-source code behind OP Mainnet, published so that anyone can launch a rollup with it. The plan is a Superchain: many chains on the same code, upgraded in step, with each new chain paying the Optimism Collective the greater of 2.5% of its revenue or 15% of its onchain profit.

Coinbase's Base became the best-known example, opening to the public on 9 August 2023, and under an agreement announced later that month it signed up to the revenue split and could receive up to 118 million OP over six years. Uniswap Labs followed with Unichain in February 2025, on the same 2.5% or 15% terms.

Base then outgrew the whole family: on 28 September 2026 L2BEAT put the value secured on Base at about $16.2 billion, around eight times the figure for OP Mainnet.

Which is why 18 February 2026 mattered: that day Base announced it would move to a unified stack of its own, to cut coordination overhead and ship upgrades faster. It said it would stay compatible with the OP Stack specification and remain a customer of OP Enterprise, the support offering of OP Labs, which develops the OP Stack. OP Labs' chief executive pointed out that the new stack still shared 99% of its code with the OP Stack and related infrastructure.

What OP holders vote on

OP started with a supply of exactly 4,294,967,296 tokens, which is 2 to the power of 32. The first airdrop, on 31 May 2022, went to 248,699 eligible addresses and did not go smoothly. Some people claimed before the announcement was out, the public servers that wallets connect to buckled under the rush, and the team said it took more than five hours of non-stop work to stabilise.

Governance runs through two houses, and either one can block a protocol upgrade.

• Token House: voting power follows OP held, and holders can hand theirs to a delegate, so the house approves budgets and grant proposals, elects councils and boards, and can also veto upgrades signed off by the Developer Advisory Board.

• Citizens' House: one member, one vote, with membership going to qualifying chains and apps, and to individual users who show regular activity and prove they are human through World ID or Passport.

August 2026 showed what token weighting means in practice. The Foundation proposed moving 546.9 million OP into a Strategic Ecosystem Fund it would manage for partnerships and institutional deals. That was the unspent remainder of the pot reserved for user airdrops, after five drops had handed out 269.1 million. The Token House passed it by 17.97 million votes to 10.93 million, clearing the 51% bar. By CoinDesk's count, one late vote of about 8.5 million OP from a core development team decided it, and without that vote approval would have stopped at roughly 46%.

Paying for public goods after the fact

Then there is retroactive public goods funding, built on the Collective's slogan that impact equals profit. The reasoning is that judging work already done is easier than betting on work still to come.

Round one, at the end of 2021, handed $1 million to 58 projects. By round three, whose results came out on 11 January 2024, the pot had grown to 30 million OP, split among 501 recipients ranging from OP Stack contributors to writers and educators, with badgeholders in the Citizens' House casting the votes.

Voting project by project had known downsides, and the design kept shifting. By 2025 rewards went out monthly, sized by open-source scoring algorithms. From Season 8, which started in mid-2025, citizens stopped voting even on which algorithm to use, after many voters in a trial reported picking whichever one treated their favourite projects best. The forum post announcing the change filed that trial under a blunt heading: voting on algorithms is not effective.