The co-founder and CEO of OP Labs, quietly running one of the largest scaling ecosystems on Ethereum - and giving the core technology away for free.
Source: “Building Optimism” talk, CSS 2023
Jing Wang runs OP Labs, the company that builds and maintains Optimism, from a seat most people in crypto have never seen her occupy loudly. That is by design. While the tokens and the price charts get the attention, Wang has spent years on the less glamorous work: keeping an open-source framework called the OP Stack good enough that other companies choose to build their entire businesses on top of it.
The bet is working. The OP Stack now underpins a majority of Ethereum's Layer 2 activity. Coinbase built its Base chain on it. Uniswap, World, Kraken, and Sony's blockchain efforts all touch the same modular plumbing. Twenty-four of the fifty-two live rollups on Ethereum run the stack Wang's team ships. For a piece of infrastructure that is given away for free, that is an unusual kind of market share.
Optimism's pitch has always been narrower and more honest than the industry's usual promises. Ethereum is slow and expensive at scale. A Layer 2 is a second network that batches transactions, settles them cheaply, and posts proof back to Ethereum. Optimism's version, the “optimistic rollup,” assumes transactions are valid unless someone challenges them. It is a boring-sounding idea that turned out to matter a great deal.
Wang's own framing cuts against crypto's speed obsession. Early scaling work, she has said, chased throughput at all costs and missed the point. Raw speed with no usability is a demo, not a product. That reframe - usability first - is the through-line of everything OP Labs has shipped since.
Scaling at all costs didn't work. You need to address usability.
Wang did not arrive in crypto through Ethereum. She started in Bitcoin, and grew frustrated with how few women were building in that developer community. The turn came from Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum's creator, who encouraged her to look at Ethereum and introduced her to Karl Floersch at the Ethereum Foundation.
Floersch mentored her on a scaling research project built around Plasma, an early scaling design. That work became Plasma Group, a small nonprofit. When Plasma's limits became clear, the team pivoted to optimistic rollups and, in 2019, co-founded Optimism alongside Floersch, Ben Jones, and Kelvin Fichter.
Her path in was non-linear. She studied art and computer science at Wellesley College before leaving, got involved with the MIT Bitcoin Club, ran the Blockchain Education Network across thousands of students in dozens of countries, did a stint in product at NASDAQ, took a blockchain fellowship with IDEO, and collaborated on Handshake, a decentralized naming system. The common thread was less about any single technology and more about getting more people fluent in it.
Optimism started as a nonprofit, and the memory of scrounging for funding stuck. The team, Wang has said, vowed to never leave another builder stuck in that position. Out of that came retroactive public goods funding: the idea that it is easier to agree on what was valuable than to predict it, so you reward open-source work after it has proven useful rather than betting on it up front.
That principle now runs through Optimism's governance and grants. It is also a quiet argument about how open ecosystems should sustain themselves - closer to a public library than a walled garden. Giving the OP Stack away for free only makes sense if you believe the ecosystem, not the codebase, is the moat.
The architecture matches the philosophy. Rather than one monolithic system, the OP Stack breaks a blockchain into components - execution, settlement, sequencing, data availability - that can be swapped and customized while staying compatible with each other. That modularity is what lets Base, World, and others run their own chains without leaving the shared network Optimism calls the Superchain.
A network of interoperable Layer 2 chains sharing security and standards. “Always part of the long-term vision,” Wang says - not a pivot.
Reward public-goods and open-source work after it proves valuable, so builders aren't left begging for grants up front.
“A network of Layer 2 chains has always been part of the long-term vision.”
“Institutions need predictable costs, fast execution, and systems that can handle real volume.”
“The OP Stack is here to support the technologies that best meet the needs of our customers.”
“Learn, develop, and evangelize blockchain technology; build strong communities by promoting technological literacy.”
Ben Jones recalled that whenever a new person entered the circle, Wang would make a point to include them and ask them a specific question - a habit he said only sharpened as she scaled into leadership.
“If you have to put the finger on the pulse of the lifeline of the Optimism Collective, it is Jing Wang,” Jones told CoinDesk.
When OP Labs cut roughly a fifth of its staff in 2026, Wang framed it as narrowing focus and reducing coordination overhead - not a response to financial trouble.