OP Labs

In most software markets, giving away your flagship product to competitors would be a firing offense. At OP Labs PBC, it is the founding strategy. The New York-anchored, remote-first company of roughly 94 people writes the OP Stack, an open-source framework that lets anyone - a crypto exchange, a DeFi protocol, a Japanese electronics conglomerate - launch their own Ethereum-compatible blockchain. Anyone can fork it. Many have. And that is how a company with fewer than a hundred employees came to sit beneath the majority of Ethereum's Layer 2 economy.

The numbers describe the scale. According to the company, hundreds of firms including Sony, Coinbase, Kraken, Uniswap, OKX and Bitpanda have used the OP Stack to launch chains, and over 65% of Layer 2 activity on Ethereum has run through it. In 2025, the Superchain - the family of OP Stack chains that share governance and revenue - processed roughly six billion transactions.

OP Labs began in 2019 as something far less commercial: Plasma Group, a nonprofit research collective working on an Ethereum scaling approach called plasma. When Vitalik Buterin's rollup designs made their own research direction obsolete, the team did the unsentimental thing. They wound down the nonprofit, applied their optimistic design patterns to rollups, and incorporated as Optimism PBC with $3.5 million from Paradigm and IDEO. The founding group - Jinglan "Jing" Wang, Karl Floersch, Benjamin Jones and Kevin Ho, joined early by engineers Mark Tyneway and Kelvin Fichter - carried the research ethos into the company's legal structure itself: a Public Benefit Corporation, chartered to scale "Ethereum's technology and values," not just its throughput.

The core product, an optimistic rollup, works on a simple wager. Transactions are executed off Ethereum's congested mainnet, then posted back in compressed batches that are presumed valid unless someone proves otherwise - hence "optimistic." The result is Ethereum security at a fraction of Ethereum prices. By early 2022, the company said its network had saved users over $1 billion in gas fees. Weeks later, Paradigm and a16z co-led a $150 million Series B at a $1.65 billion valuation.

The economics run through three channels. First, the Optimism Collective's revenue-sharing arrangement: chains joining the Superchain historically contributed a share of sequencer revenue - the fees earned ordering transactions - back to the Collective. Base alone contributed more than $16 million over the course of its partnership. Second, the OP token, launched via a May 2022 airdrop to over 250,000 addresses, capitalizes the ecosystem's treasury. Third, and increasingly central, is OP Enterprise: a paid tier where OP Labs runs the infrastructure so exchanges and fintechs do not have to.

That third leg became strategic in February 2026, when Coinbase announced Base - by far the largest OP Stack chain, with billions in locked value - would migrate to in-house technology and stop sharing revenue. The OP token fell roughly 25% on the news, and commentators openly questioned the Superchain thesis. OP Labs' hedge was already in place: Base remains an OP Enterprise customer during its transition, and Kraken's Ink had signed a multi-year fully managed deal, validating the pivot toward enterprise-grade infrastructure for regulated firms.

The competitive field

OP Labs' closest rival is Offchain Labs' Arbitrum, the other major optimistic rollup, which has traded the lead in locked value with OP chains for years. A second front is cryptographic: ZK-rollup stacks from Matter Labs (zkSync), Polygon (CDK and AggLayer), StarkNet and Scroll promise faster finality via validity proofs rather than fraud proofs. A third is operational: managed rollup providers like Conduit and Caldera compete for the same enterprise deployments OP Enterprise targets - often deploying the OP Stack itself, a peculiar consequence of open source.

The company's differentiation is standardization plus velocity. Every OP Stack chain inherits the upgrades OP Labs ships - fault proofs in 2024, Flashblocks' 250-millisecond blocks in 2025, native interoperability now on devnet with mainnet targeted for late 2026. Interop is the endgame: it would let Superchain chains transact atomically with one another, turning a federation of separate networks into something closer to one elastic blockchain.