Yesterday, a news story shook the Layer 2 ecosystem. A major exchange announced that it would be ending its three-year partnership with Optimism. More precisely, it means the exchange will no longer rely on the OP Stack.

This matters because that exchange’s L2 has been sharing a significant portion of its revenue with the Optimism consortium every year. The accumulated amount so far exceeds $16 million. In particular, over the past few months, its contribution has surged—so much so that in January it accounted for 90% of total revenue.

After this news broke, the Optimism coin reacted immediately. The OP token plunged. It fell from its 2024 high of $4.84 to around $0.16. This shows just how hard the market was hit.

OP Labs’ CEO mentioned on X, “In the short term, on-chain revenue will take a hit, but we need to upgrade our business model.” He also added that they will continue to maintain the partnership as enterprise service customers.

What’s interesting is that this decision wasn’t entirely unexpected. The OP Stack is open source, and for a large exchange, independence may have been necessary to build its own technical architecture and accelerate upgrade processes. That’s so it can simplify the code and test features that could be used on Ethereum in the future.

So, is the future of the Optimism coin truly bleak? Not entirely. On the same day, an Ethereum staking protocol announced that it would move its crypto credit card business from another L2 to the Optimism mainnet. About 70,000 active cards, 300,000 accounts, and user assets worth millions of dollars are expected to be transferred. This could help position Optimism as a leading public blockchain in the payments sector.

In a broader context, the concept of the Superchain is still valid. Projects such as Sonium, Unichain, and Worldchain continue to operate based on the OP Stack. For the Optimism coin to recover from the short-term shock, the key will be how quickly the developer ecosystem and real on-chain activity can expand. You should pay attention to this by watching the recent movements in the Optimism ecosystem over the past few months.