How does Optimism ensure long-term success?
Optimism strives to create a sustainable ecosystem flywheel. In this flywheel, revenue contributed by OP Chains to the Optimism Collective funds open-source development and drives ecosystem growth, which strengthens the OP Stack and attracts more end-users, apps, integration partners, and chains. In implementing this flywheel, Optimism uses a public decision making process designed to prevent short-term profit seeking at the expense of the platform, while ensuring organizations contributing the OP Stack remain accountable to tokenholders and customers. This process includes a capital allocation model, designed to avoid many of the common failure modes of corporate governance, aiming to ensure the product always remains at the cutting edge. For more details, please see the Operating Manual.
How does Optimism generate revenue?
OP Chains in the Superchain earn transaction fees whenever users send transactions onchain, including for payments, trading, identity, and other applications. Each chain also pays costs to publish its activity to Ethereum for security. OP Chains contribute a portion of their revenue to Optimism. This treasury is used to drive growth, provide shared infrastructure, and fund open source contributions that benefit the Superchain. Superchain member chains contribute the greater of:- 15% of net transaction fee profit (transaction fees earned on L2 - costs paid to Ethereum L1), or
- 2.5% of gross transaction fees
How is the treasury managed?
The treasury is currently stewarded by the Foundation, but is subject to oversight by key stakeholder groups, via Optimism’s public decision making process. Specifically, tokenholders, chains, apps, and users are asked to oversee annual budgets, which enable the Foundation to deploy the treasury into initiatives aimed at generated the sustainable flywheel described above. Foundation Budget Reports can be found here on the governance forum. The OP Token Unlock (Estimated) tracker is listed under OP trackers on the dashboards, trackers, and addresses page. You can find more information via the Operating Manual here.What is Optimism’s commitment to Open Source Software?
Optimism has always been committed to funding open-source software. OP Labs, a core contributor to the OP Stack, is registered as a public benefit corporation with a mission to enhance and enshrine access to public goods. The OP Stack is MIT licensed and Optimism dedicates a significant portion of its treasury to funding public goods and open-source software. Optimism operates various grant programs to incentivize and reward open-source contributions. Grant programs can be found via atlas.optimism.io.What can I do with the OP Token?
The OP token was created in May of 2022, with an initial supply of 4,294,967,296 OP tokens. The token was launched as a governance token to enable tokenholders to weigh in on technical and economic decisions that impact Optimism, such as protocol upgrades and capital allocation. The Optimism Foundation estimates the total supply of circulating OP tokens to increase as detailed in the OP Token Unlock (Estimated) tracker. Tokenholders can use OP to vote on:- Protocol Upgrades
- Token Allocations
- Adjusting Inflation
- Removing the Director of the Optimism Foundation
- Dissolutions
- Elections (and representative removal)
- Protecting the rights of tokenholders by consenting to any changes to the founding documents of the Optimism Foundation, if those changes would materially reduce their rights.
- Ratification of Governing Documents