Optimism Foundation: The Non-Profit Steering Ethereum's Largest Layer 2 Ecosystem
The Optimism Foundation is a nonprofit organization governing Optimism protocol's ecosystem development and public goods funding. Established and controlled by Optimism's core contributors, the Foundation focuses on funding and stewarding Optimism Superchain network's growth. Established as a sister organization to Optimism PBC (recently renamed OP Labs PBC) in 2022, The Foundation was created to purposefully separate Optimism's engineering team (OP Labs) and its governing body (the Foundation). Jinglan Wang, a co-founder of Optimism (co-founded with Karl Floersch, Kevin Ho, Ben Jones in 2019) heads the Foundation as its CEO and Executive Director.
It's important to note the difference between OP Labs and the Optimism Foundation. OP Labs is where the code is written. The Foundation works on governance systems, ecosystem fund distribution, treasury, and leading the larger Optimism Collective. The Collective is Optimism's decentralized governance system where token holders and community members can vote on changes to the protocol, funding allocations, network economic policy, etc. The Foundation serves as the on-chain/off-chain tool needed to bridge what would ideally be 100% decentralized governance and the very real need to operate a blockchain that handles millions of transactions per day.
The OP Stack and Superchain Architecture
Arguably the Foundation's biggest impact on the Ethereum ecosystem at large has been through the encouragement and maintenance of the OP Stack, a modular open-source stack that enables any team to build their own Layer 2 blockchain built upon Ethereum. OP Stack hosts OP Mainnet (Optimism's primary chain), as well as a growing number of Layer 2 chains referred to collectively as the Superchain. These chains are built using the same tech stack and governance system, but are individually independent.
Major companies and projects that have built on OP Stack include Coinbase which launched Base, the first major U.S. crypto exchange to operate its own blockchain, on the OP Stack in August 2023, Uniswap with Unichain, World's Worldchain, Kraken with Ink, and Sony with Soneium. As of late 2025, OP Stack chains accounted for over 62% of total Ethereum L2 market share measured by transaction volume and processed about 13% of all cryptocurrency transactions across the industry. Nearly half of the live rollups tracked on L2Beat were built on OP Stack with billions of dollars locked across those rollups.
Funding, Treasury, and the Buyback Pivot
Optimism had raised $175 million in venture capital funding in two rounds. This includes $25 million in Series A funding in February 2021 and $150 million Series B in March 2022, which was led by Andreessen Horowitz and Paradigm. The OP token was released in 2022, which featured one of the largest airdrops in the space. Early users and builders within the Optimism ecosystem received more than 230 million OP tokens (greater than 5% of initial supply).
The Foundation proposal economy would be different than it once was. In January 2026, the Foundation released a proposal to allocate 50% of future Superchain sequencer revenue toward monthly buybacks of OP tokens. This would transition OP away from being a pure governance token and tie its value to the economic productivity of the network. In the previous 12 months, the Superchain had earned 5,868 ETH ($18 million) in sequencer revenue. To date, 100% had been sent to a treasury controlled by network governance. The proposed change, voted on later that month by the community, would allocate half of said revenue stream to buying back OTC tokens. Acquired tokens would be sent back into the treasury and could later be burned, used for staking rewards, or allocated to participants protecting shared infrastructure.
Governance Structure and Season 9 Reforms
The Foundation has undergone several shifts to its governance framework since 2022. Season 9 reforms were proposed by the Foundation in January 2026 with the Foundation reflecting that "The Optimism Collective can't be just another DAO, but neither can it resemble a traditional corporation". This update suggested changes to the capital allocation structures to better allocate resources and invest in the Superchain; create some sort of legal entity (potentially a DUNA) to allow more voting power on-chain; and move governance's role from being one that directly drives progress to one that holds OP Labs accountable for following through on execution similar to a board of directors in a public company.
One important note of change: Retroactive Public Goods Funding (RPGF), one of Optimism's hallmark developments earlier on (a system that funded projects that had already demonstrated value to the ecosystem versus money given in anticipation of future promises), would be put on hiatus for a minimum of 12 months. The Foundation stated they would evaluate other options, and there may be a proposal to redistribute all or some of the ~775 million OP tokens currently allocated to RPGF.
The Foundation shared more challenges within operations as well. In late 2024, co-founder Jing Wang explained to The Block that the project "massively overhired", lacked direction and had to pivot back to having one united objective. Season 9 became the answer to that introspection.
What the Foundation Is and What It Isn't
The Optimism Foundation is an unusual crypto company. It's not building the base software (that's OP Labs), it's not running a centralized exchange or consumer facing product. What they do is steward the governance layer, treasury, and incentives for a family of Layer 2 blockchains that together comprise Ethereum's largest technical stack. Based in New York, the Foundation is the institutional framework for a protocol recording hundreds of thousands of transactions every day on chains utilized by Coinbase, Uniswap, Sony, Kraken, and countless enterprise users. The big question for everyone who has been tracking the Foundation's journey is whether the governance reforms and economic realignment it initiated in early 2026 can yield sustainable value for the OP token and Superchain ecosystem long-term.
