Original: DL News

Translation: PANews

The leading cryptocurrency exchange in the United States is completely reforming its nearly three-year partnership with Layer 2 (L2) developers: The Base blockchain under Coinbase will now shift to using self-developed code instead of relying on Optimism's OP Stack.

A spokesperson for Optimism confirmed that Coinbase will stop sharing the revenue from the Base chain with the Optimism Alliance. During the partnership, this revenue share has accumulated to over $16 million.

"This is a blow to on-chain short-term revenue," OP Labs CEO Jing Wang stated on the X platform, "but as the crypto community has long said, we need to upgrade our business model."

She added that Coinbase will continue to cooperate as a client of OP Labs' "OP Enterprise Services."

Base's "going solo" has directly impacted the price of the Optimism token OP. Since Wednesday, OP has plummeted by a quarter, trading just below $0.14 at the time of publication, far below the historical high of $4.84 set in 2024.

For a long time, Coinbase has shared 15% of Base's revenue with the managing digital collaboration organization, the Optimism Alliance. To date, Base has contributed 8,387 Ethereum, equivalent to about $16.4 million based on Wednesday's prices.

This money accounts for 41% of the total historical revenue of the Optimism Alliance. In recent months, the revenue contribution from Base has sharply risen, reaching 90% in January.

Therefore, this change could have a significant impact on the Superchain. The Superchain is a blockchain alliance built on the OP Stack, including Sony's Soneium, Uniswap's Unichain, Kraken's Ink, Worldcoin's World Chain, as well as Optimism's own OP mainnet.

Neither Jing Wang nor Coinbase responded to DL News' request for comment.

"We appreciate our three-year collaboration with Base and are proud to have helped it become one of the most successful Layer 2 networks in history," an Optimism spokesperson stated in a statement to DL News. "Our focus remains on providing enterprise-level blockchain infrastructure for the ecosystem and will continue to serve Base as OP enterprise clients while they are also building an independent technical architecture."

"Disappointing"

The private company OP Labs has raised over $175 million from institutions such as Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and Paradigm. Its engineers are responsible for maintaining and upgrading the OP Stack, but any proposals must be approved by the Optimism Alliance.

The associated entity, the Optimism Foundation, recently stated that it would transfer some of the responsibilities for funding OP Labs' operations to the Alliance.

The "contribution" of Superchain members is valued in Ethereum. This multimillion-dollar crypto asset was initially idle, while the Alliance issued grants in OP tokens to attract developers to the Superchain—more developers mean more applications, and more applications lead to more users.

However, Optimism recently began utilizing these Ethereum assets: Last March, the Alliance approved using most of the Ethereum for staking to earn passive income; just last month, the Alliance also passed a repurchase plan that ties the value of OP tokens to the development of the Superchain. Half of the Alliance's revenue will be used to repurchase OP, with the foundation authorized to manage the other half of the funds.

Why create a Superchain?

"This is disappointing, but it's also expected on many levels," an anonymous member of GFX Labs, a representative organization of the Optimism Alliance, told DL News, "Base must be accountable to its shareholders and do what is most beneficial for them."

The OP Stack is open-source code, which means anyone can use it for free without obtaining permission from Optimism.