- Coinbase‘s Base Blockchain is severing its core partnership with Optimism by no longer using the OP Stack, moving to an in-house system instead.
- This ends a revenue-sharing deal where Base contributed 15% of its fees, totaling over $16.4 million, to the Optimism Collective.
- The decision is a significant financial blow to the Superchain ecosystem and caused the OP token’s price to drop by a quarter.
Coinbase has overhauled its partnership with Optimism, announcing this week that its Base blockchain will stop using Optimism’s OP Stack software. Consequently, Coinbase will cease sharing revenue with the Optimism Collective, ending nearly three years of collaboration and a key funding stream. “This is a hit to near-term onchain revenues,” OP Labs CEO Jing Wang stated. However, she noted Base will remain a customer of OP Labs‘ enterprise services.
The financial impact is substantial, as Base’s contributions recently constituted 90% of the Collective’s monthly revenue, according to January data. This shift could affect the broader Superchain, a network including Sony‘s Soneium and Kraken‘s Ink. “It’s disappointing, but in many ways unsurprising,” a Collective delegate told DL News, adding that the promised technical interoperability has not materialized.
Coinbase explained the move, detailed in a blog post, aims to accelerate upgrades and simplify its codebase. Meanwhile, the OP token price plunged roughly 25% following the news. Optimism did secure a separate win, as ether.fi announced it would migrate its crypto credit card operations to OP Mainnet, as noted in a recent blog post.
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