Optimism
Networks · Layer-2About
Optimism is a network of chains called the Superchain, built on the open-source OP Stack. Chains like Base, Unichain, and Ink use the OP Stack. Every OP Chain contributes revenue to the Optimism Collective through a standardized model, aligning incentives and reinvesting in ecosystem growth. OP holders govern protocol upgrades and funding.
History
Optimism’s Beginnings
Plasma Group was founded in January 2019 as a non-profit researching Ethereum scalability. Based on a commercially reasonable search, no information regarding who founded Plasma Group has been disclosed. In June 2019, Plasma Group integrated concepts from Vitalik Buterin’s rollup design into its own. This led to the project team’s ideation of an Optimistic Rollup. In January 2020, Plasma Group recapped its year of research before sunsetting Plasma Group and introducing the Optimism Public Benefit Corporation (Optimism PBC), created by its founders Benjamin Jones, Karl Floersch, Jing Wang, and Kevin Ho.
Road from Testnet to Public Mainnet
In February 2020, the alpha release of the Optimistic Virtual Machine (OVM) was announced, and its code was open-sourced. The OVM is an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatible execution environment that was the first implementation of a Layer-2 optimistic rollup network. In September 2020, Optimism launched a phased testnet of its envisioned scaling solution. In January 2021, Optimism recapped its first year before soft launching its mainnet in a similar tiered approach that featured several centralized defense layers to protect early users. The public mainnet was eventually delayed in March 2021 to allow for “a more coordinated community launch.” In July 2021, Optimism announced its Retroactive Public Goods Funding (RetroPGF) program and RetroPGF 1 was held in October 2021.
Optimism expanded its mainnet by opening applications to the OVM beta in August 2021. This process began the whitelisting of projects to launch in coordination with the project team. In preparation for the public mainnet launch, September 2021 saw Optimism unveil an upgrade to replace the network’s OVM and EVM compatibility with “EVM equivalence.” This upgrade enabled projects to “one-click deploy” EVM protocols on Optimism while they run near-identically as on Ethereum.
Finally, on Dec. 16, 2021, Optimism announced the public mainnet was officially launched after the project team removed whitelist requirements. As a result, anyone could deploy smart contracts on Optimism.
Governance, Incentive, and Technological Developments
After Optimism’s public mainnet launch, the following network developments took place:
- Throughout February and March 2022, Optimism reduced gas fees by lowering its variable rollup cost and batch-compressing call data.
- In March 2022, Optimism introduced the idea for a fault proof called “Cannon.”
- In April 2022, Optimism recapped its history and declared a new chapter “driven by community ownership and governance.” Later that month, Optimism introduced the Optimism Collective, announced the OP token alongside Airdrop 1, and rebranded “Optimism PBC” to “OP Labs PBC.” Additionally, Optimism Foundation was founded to steward the Optimism Collective.
- In May 2022, Optimism announced the “OP Stimpack,” where OP tokens were distributed as an incentive from the Governance Fund via a “Phase 0” distribution to 24 projects.
- In May 2022, Airdrop 1 went live, distributing OP tokens to 248,699 wallet addresses based on various eligibility criteria and overlap bonuses.
- In May 2022, Optimism announced the development of its “Bedrock” upgrade, which aimed to reduce gas fees through batch compression, shortening Ethereum to Optimism deposit times, increasing bridge security, enabling fault proofs and validity proofs, improving node performance, and further equalizing Optimism and Ethereum.
- In October 2022, Optimism introduced the OP Stack, and the vision for a “Superchain” emerged. The OP Stack is Optimism's modular, open-source, forkable technology stack that allows for the creation of interoperable Layer-2 blockchains (”OP Chains”).
- In December 2022, Optimism announced RetroPGF 2, where OP tokens would be distributed to projects in the tooling and utilities, infrastructure and dependencies, and education categories.
- In February 2023, Airdrop 2 went live, distributing OP tokens to 307,965 wallet addresses based on various eligibility criteria and bonus attributes.
Superchain Era
In 2023, Optimism’s vision for a “Superchain” was brought to life:
- In February 2023, Optimism formally announced its vision for a “Superchain,” a network of OP Chains built with the OP Stack. A technical explainer of the OP Stack can be seen here.
- In June 2023, Optimism’s Bedrock upgrade went live. The upgrade drastically reduced gas fees for users and developers. It modularized Optimism, allowing developers to use the OP Stack to launch custom OP Chains. Lastly, Bedrock introduced a consistent two-second block time and enabled support for EIP-1559, introducing a priority fee on Optimism.
- With the launch of Bedrock and the upcoming launches of OP Chains, the previously lone blockchain called “Optimism” was rebranded to “OP Mainnet” to delineate “between the OP Mainnet blockchain and the Collective, vibe, and ethos that “Optimism” encompasses.”
- In June 2023, Optimism announced RetroPGF 3, where OP tokens would be distributed to projects working on the OP Stack, collective governance, the developer ecosystem, and/or end user experience and adoption.
- In July 2023, Optimism announced a draft of the “Law of Chains,” an open-neutrality framework to guide governance decisions and promote user protection, decentralization, and economic autonomy across the Superchain. The purpose of these standards is to reduce the fragmentation of Optimism by unifying the network of OP Chains that opt into the Law of Chains.
- In August 2023, Optimism’s most active OP Chain, Base, launched on mainnet.
- In September 2023, Airdrop 3 went live, distributing OP tokens to 31,529 wallet addresses that delegated OP tokens.
- In January 2024, Optimism’s Canyon upgrade was approved and went live. The upgrade included various EIPs meant to “reduce how quickly the base fee rises when blocks are over the gas target,” enable developers to have access to a commonly used contract on all OP Chain networks, and fixed a bug where “the deposit transaction nonce was not in consensus encoding.”
- In February 2024, Airdrop 4 went live, distributing OP tokens to 22,998 wallet addresses that created successful non-fungible token (NFT) mints across Ethereum, OP Mainnet, Base, and Zora.
- In February 2024, Optimism’s Delta upgrade was approved and went live, introducing Span Batches that reduced costs across OP Chains.
- In March 2024, Optimism’s Ecotone upgrade was approved and went live, introducing EIP-4844 blobs for data availability after Ethereum’s Dencun upgrade. The upgrade resulted in a ~90.00% reduction in transaction fees on OP Mainnet.
- In March 2024, Optimism announced the winners of its We [Heart] The Art creator contest, which ran for several months and distributed OP tokens to 47 creators.
- In March 2024, Optimism released an updated roadmap for RetroPGF. Four rounds of RetroPGF were planned for the year. Each round had a specific focus, and for the first time, funding extended outside of OP Mainnet and into various OP Chains.
- In April 2024, Optimism announced RetroPGF 4, where OP tokens would be distributed to “Onchain Builders” that are “building across the Superchain, increasing demand for blockspace, and driving value to the Collective.” Applications opened in May 2024.
OP Mainnet is operational and many OP Chains like Base, Zora Network, Mode Network, Fraxtal, and Redstone are a part of the Superchain. A full list of OP Chains can be seen here. A live OP Mainnet status is viewable here, while onchain statistics can be seen on Dune. Furthermore, OP continues to serve as the governance and incentive token for Optimism, while the Optimism Collective guides the network's future through the ability to propose and vote on proposals related to areas such as network upgrades and OP incentive distributions.
In June 2024, the team released the Fault Proof System on mainnet. This "permissionless" system allows users to publish output proposals with the fault dispute system to produce claims. Additionally in June, the Chain Delegation program was refined to support the Supperchain strategy, by providing up to 1.5M OP tokens to eligible OP chains.
By August 2024, FOAM launched several components on the Base network, including the FOAM Token, MVP, smart contracts, Hostel webapp, and Zone anchors.
In September 2024, following the approval of SIP 384, SNAXchain was launched. Synthetix has partnered with Conduit for its chain infrastructure and Wormhole for cross-chain messaging between SNAXchain, Optimism, and Ethereum. Furthermore, Boba Network also joined the Superchain Ecosystem.
In October 2024, the team announced the Optimism Airdrop #5, distributing 10,368,678 OP tokens to 54,723 unique addresses specifically to "Superchain power users".
By November 2024, Fault Proofs have been activated on Soneium Minato.
In December 2024, Ink - an Ethereum L2 blockchain developed by Kraken and built using the OP Stack - officially went live on mainnet, following a successful public testnet in earlier November.
In January 2025, the Worldcoin team enabled that Fault Proofs. This was also followed by the release of the Unichain mainnet in February, after the Uniswap team announced the mainnet release would take place with Permissionless Fault Proofs sometime in early 2025.
By June 2025, following the execution of the May 29, 2025 Executive Proposal, the Spark team announced that OP Mainnet and Unichain have been onboarded to the Spark Liquidity Layer. The deployment included the launch of sUSDC and sUSDS. At the same time, the Velodrome team announced the launch of Superswaps, developed in collaboration with Optimism and Hyperlane.
In July 2025, Upbit added support for OP. In August 2025, Ronin announced its evolution from a gaming-centered Ethereum sidechain into an Ethereum L2 network. By September, Ronin Network further explained that it will transition to an Ethereum L2 via the OP Stack, following the Ronin Governing Validators' passing of a vote to adopt Optimism's OP Stack as an L2 provider. Furhtermore, OP Labs announced the first public release of Kona-node, a modular rollup node for the OP Stack written in Rust.
In September 2025, following their partnership with Flashbots, Optimism introduced Flashblocks, a streaming block-construction system developed by Flashbots, on OP Mainnet.
In October 2025, a forum discussion has started on a proposal that introduces a smart contract upgrade that transitions key governance powers from off-chain administration to on-chain control. After a successful voting, the proposal was passed.
