Governance of the OP Stack and the Superchain of chains built on it.
Optimism is an Ethereum rollup, but its more consequential product is the OP Stack: open-source software other teams use to launch their own chains, including Base. Those chains form the Superchain and share standards and part of their revenue. OP is the governance token of that arrangement, so it is better understood as a stake in a standard than as a bet on one chain's traffic.
The OP Stack becoming the default way to launch a chain matters more than OP Mainnet's own volume.
Superchain revenue sharing is a rare concrete link between adoption and an L2 token.
The two-house design is a real experiment in avoiding pure token plutocracy.
Like Arbitrum, OP Mainnet is an optimistic rollup that executes transactions off Ethereum and posts data back, with a challenge window protecting correctness. The distinguishing piece is the OP Stack, a standardised codebase for launching rollups. Chains built with it can join the Superchain, adopting shared standards and contributing a portion of revenue to the collective, which turns a single chain into a network of chains.
Voting in the Token House on upgrades and funding
Governance over Superchain standards and treasury
Delegation to representatives active in governance
Gas on OP chains is paid in ETH, not OP. The Superchain arrangement does route a share of member chains' revenue to the collective treasury, which is a more concrete link between adoption and the token than most L2 governance tokens have. Even so, that value reaches OP holders only through governance decisions about the treasury, not as a direct distribution.
Optimism runs a two-chamber system. The Token House, made up of OP holders, votes on protocol upgrades and inflationary funding. The Citizens' House, based on non-transferable citizenship rather than token weight, allocates retroactive public goods funding. The split is an explicit attempt to stop governance from collapsing into simple plutocracy, and it is one of the more genuinely distinctive designs in the space.
Centralized sequencer and upgradeable contracts, as with other optimistic rollups.
Gas is paid in ETH, so chain usage does not directly accrue to OP.
Ongoing token emissions fund ecosystem programs and add supply.
Superchain members could adopt the open-source stack without joining or contributing revenue.
Competition from Arbitrum, zk rollups and alternative L1s for the same applications.
Base is built with the OP Stack and is part of the Superchain, but it is operated by Coinbase and has no token of its own. So Base activity strengthens the OP Stack as a standard and contributes revenue to the collective, without Base being owned by the Optimism DAO.
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Optimism · optimism.io · primary source
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