Optimism (OP)

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Historical price evolution of Optimism

Daily historical data. Updated automatically.

The project that would later become known as Optimism has its roots in January 2019, when Plasma Group was founded, a non-profit organisation dedicated to Ethereum scalability. Its founders were Ben Jones, Karl Floersch (former researcher at the Ethereum Foundation), Jinglan Wang (former product manager at Nasdaq) and Kevin Ho. During this period, the group developed the Optimistic Rollup concept based on the original rollup design proposed by Vitalik Buterin.

In January 2020, Plasma Group evolved into Optimism PBC (Public Benefit Corporation), marking the formal beginning of the project. This structural change coincided with their first seed funding round, in which they raised $3.5 million from investors such as Paradigm and IDEO Colab Ventures. Development continued during 2020, and in February 2021 the company completed its Series A round, raising $25 million from Andreessen Horowitz, Paradigm and IDEO Colab Ventures. By then they had already launched their first mainnet alpha in January 2021.

On 16th December 2021, the official launch of the Optimism mainnet took place. A few months later, in March 2022, the company closed its Series B round for $150 million led by a16z and Paradigm, reaching a valuation of $1,650 million. This period also marked an important organisational restructuring: Optimism PBC was divided into two separate entities, OP Labs PBC (focused on technical development, with Liam Horne as CEO) and the Optimism Foundation (dedicated to governance and ecosystem growth, with Jinglan Wang as chief executive).

On 31st May 2022, the OP token was launched alongside the first airdrop, distributing 5% of the total supply to more than 250,000 addresses, including early users, DAO voters and Gitcoin donors. The token reached an all-time high of $4.57, with a total supply of 4,294,967,296 OP and an annual inflation of 2%. During 2023, the project introduced the OP Stack, an open-source modular framework for building interoperable L2 blockchains. This year also saw the announcement by Coinbase of building Base, its own L2 on OP Stack, and the rebrand of Optimism to "OP Mainnet".

The year 2024 marked a significant expansion of the ecosystem, with the adoption of OP Stack by Kraken, Uniswap, World Network and Sony Blockchain Lab. Of the 52 active rollups at that time, 24 used OP Stack with $19,000 million in TVL, representing 52.7% of all Ethereum L2 transactions. During this period, 5 airdrops in total were completed. In 2025, the Superchain reached 34 OP Chains on mainnet, representing more than 50% of all Ethereum L2 activity and more than 10% of all crypto activity, with an aggregate ecosystem TVL of approximately $6,300 million at the end of the year (278% year-on-year growth). This year also saw the implementation of Flashblocks, reducing block time from 2 seconds to 250 milliseconds, and new participants such as Upbit, OKX (XLayer), Unichain (Uniswap), Soneium (Sony), Celo and World Network joined the Superchain.

In February 2026, governance approved an OP buyback programme that allocates 50% of all Superchain fee revenue to monthly token purchases on the open market, establishing a direct link between token value and network growth.

Optimism functions as a Layer 2 blockchain on Ethereum through a mechanism called optimistic rollups. The system bundles hundreds of transactions off Ethereum's main network, processes them on its own infrastructure and subsequently publishes the resulting data on Ethereum. The "optimistic" characteristic of the protocol lies in transactions being assumed valid by default, without immediate verification. However, any participant can dispute a transaction suspected of fraud during a 7-day challenge period. If a transaction is proven to be fraudulent, the validator that approved it loses their economic deposit. This architecture enables transactions to be between 10 and 100 times more economical than on Ethereum, whilst maintaining full compatibility with the Ethereum Virtual Machine, which means that Ethereum smart contracts can be deployed without modifications.

The ecosystem extends beyond OP Mainnet through the OP Stack, a modular framework that allows any team to develop their own compatible and interoperable Layer 2 blockchain, referred to as OP Chains or Superchain. The protocol's governance operates through the Optimism Collective, a bicameral structure comprised of the Token House, where OP token holders vote on technical parameters and fund allocation, and the Citizens' House, composed of selected citizens who vote on the distribution of Retroactive Public Goods Funding. This latter mechanism redistributes the revenue generated by the centralised sequencer—which obtains profits by selling block space—towards projects that demonstrate positive impact on the ecosystem.

Data verified against external sources. Some values may have changed since the last update.