Alea Report: Optimism Profits by Peddling “High Availability,” Superchain Dedicates Half of Monthly Revenue to OP Buybacks
Author: Alea Research
Translated by TechFlow
TechFlow Lead: In the fierce competition among Ethereum Layer 2s, foundational open-source codebases have gradually evolved into public goods, making it difficult to build long-term commercial barriers through simple technological forks alone. However, Optimism is pioneering a brand-new enterprise-grade commercialization pathway: encapsulating its core engineering development and fully managed operational capabilities into a high-availability service (OP Enterprise), charging premium maintenance service fees and SLA guarantee fees to industry giants such as Sony, Kraken, Uniswap, and Coinbase.
Meanwhile, Optimism is injecting the protocol's real cash flow into its token economy. Through transparent on-chain governance mechanisms, half of the revenue generated by the Superchain network and enterprise services is mandatorily used to repurchase OP tokens via over-the-counter (OTC) transactions in the open market each month, providing the most direct value capture support for token holders.
With South Korea's financial regulators officially approving tokenized securities (STOs) in 2027, multiple mainstream Korean financial institutions have fully rolled out their strategies based on OP Stack. From technology outsourcing and real-yield token buybacks to the on-chain clearing of traditional financial compliant assets, Optimism's business landscape is undergoing profound transformation.
Sony's Soneium blockchain comes with a commercial contract explicitly outlining high-availability metrics.
The Optimism Foundation is responsible for the daily operation and maintenance of the chain, guaranteeing a 99.9% uptime. If this service commitment is not met, it must provide service credits as compensation.
Kraken also handed over sequencer operations for its Ink chain to the foundation in July, followed by Uniswap Labs' Unichain adopting the same strategy.
Coinbase is gradually migrating Base to its self-developed client software but continues to purchase Optimism's top-tier technical support services.
Optimism treats OP Stack as a public good while simultaneously achieving commercialization by charging enterprises that maintain stable on-chain operations.
Its own public chain is also rapidly expanding, with OP Mainnet's total value locked (TVL) surging by 69.2% since January 1.
Figure: Fully Managed guarantees 99.9% availability, Mission-Critical provides 99.95% availability, Self Managed requires customers to build and operate their own hardware
Key Takeaways
• Optimism provides fully managed operations services for blockchain-owning enterprises: This year, Ink, Soneium, and Unichain have all handed over their sequencers to the Optimism Foundation for managed operations, while Base continued purchasing Optimism's top-tier technical support throughout the development of its self-developed client.
• Officially managed chains hold $2.49 billion in locked assets: Excluding Base, chains managed by Optimism account for 43.0% of the asset value in the OP Stack ecosystem. As of the close on September 30, OP Mainnet alone reached a scale of $1.97 billion; within the entire stack's $21.8 billion total scale, Base accounts for $16 billion.
• OP Mainnet TVL increases by 69.2%: From January 1 to September 30, its TVL climbed to $483 million. Notably, ether.fi migrated its crypto card products and $220 million in TVL from Scroll in just three days.
• Korean market establishes rollout timeline: KB Securities plans to issue tokenized money market funds (MMFs) on OP Mainnet, setting February 4, 2027, as the official launch date for South Korea's first batch of tokenized securities.
• Half of the Superchain's monthly revenue is used for OP buybacks: As of October 27, the Collective treasury had accumulated holdings of 14.39 million OP tokens. Based on valuation multiples, the fully diluted valuation (FDV) corresponding to every $1 billion of locked assets in the OP Stack is $25.5 million, whereas the corresponding valuation for the 18 chains in the Arbitrum ecosystem reaches $140.4 million.
What Does OP Enterprise Offer?
The OP Enterprise tier service was officially launched in January this year, offering three distinct service levels.
Under the Fully Managed model, the Foundation and OP Labs are responsible for deploying, operating, and upgrading the on-chain network, explicitly committing to 99.9% uptime in contracts and providing emergency response within 30 minutes during major incidents.
Base purchased the highest-spec Mission-Critical service, raising the availability commitment to 99.95%, shortening the emergency response time to 15 minutes, and assigning a dedicated technical customer success manager.
In the Self Managed model, customers manage their own underlying hardware infrastructure, though OP Labs still commits to responding to technical issues within one hour.
Figure: While shifting to a self-developed client, Base purchases Optimism's top-tier support, and Unichain joins the ranks of Optimism-managed chains
Kraken's Ink chain completed its traffic migration from Gelato on July 28, while Sony's Soneium officially connected to the fully managed service on September 30.
During the sequencer handover, Uniswap Labs retained its revenue-sharing arrangement between Unichain and the Collective.
Europe-based fintech platform Bitpanda's Vision chain is planned to launch in the second half of 2026; meanwhile, Dunamu, the parent company of Korean crypto exchange Upbit, runs GIWA in a self-managed mode, with approximately 100 million transactions completed on its testnet.
Enterprises that autonomously control their blockchains can completely retain user sequencer fees, ecosystem applications, and asset accumulation internally, a business model highly favored by major crypto exchanges.
OKX also migrated its X Layer from Polygon CDK to OP Stack in December, joining the Superchain camp represented by Kraken's Ink.
Continuous Influx of Assets to OP Mainnet
OP Mainnet's TVL surged strongly from $285.8 million at the end of 2025 to $483.4 million on September 30, representing a 69.2% increase since January 1.
Figure: Trend of OP Mainnet TVL, showing capital jumps driven by the ether.fi migration and collaboration with KB Securities
Most of this growth occurred on April 8, when liquid staking protocol ether.fi fully migrated its crypto card products and $220 million in TVL from Scroll in just three days.
Throughout the entire migration, 70,000 active Visa crypto debit cards maintained smooth operations, achieving a zero-downtime switch.
Two leading Korean brokerages are planning to launch compliant financial products on the same network.
KB Securities plans to partner with tokenization pioneer Securitize to issue tokenized money market funds on OP Mainnet, with the latter taking full responsibility for token issuance, fund administration, and transfer registry services.
Meritz Securities also signed a cooperation agreement on October 21 to conduct in-depth research on issuing and distributing tokenized compliant assets across OP Stack networks, including OP Mainnet.
Korean Market Opens on February 4
South Korea currently boasts 11.3 million verified cryptocurrency users, but domestic banks and brokerage firms were previously restricted by regulations from directly conducting crypto trading businesses.
Regulators opened a new pathway for financial institutions on September 4: the Financial Services Commission (FSC) of South Korea designated February 4, 2027, as the official launch date for Phase 1 of tokenized securities (STOs).
The first phase covers institutional money market funds, bonds, and split fractional investment products, with the public comment period for the relevant draft regulations closing on November 11.
Figure: Specific progress of five Korean financial institutions advancing tokenized security businesses based on OP Stack
Before the aforementioned deadline, five well-known Korean companies have announced R&D work based on OP Stack, with each party currently at different stages of business advancement.
In September, digital finance platform Toss and the Korea Minting, Printing and Security Printing Corporation (KOMSCO) jointly completed a full-process electronic voucher payment test, achieving instantaneous settlement of consumption and on-chain clearing within a single transaction.
DB Securities is also advancing phased system development. Each enterprise selected an architecture model aligned with its inaugural product characteristics: KB Securities and Meritz Securities opted for a shared network model, while Dunamu chose to build a dedicated independent chain.
Prior to the official launch of South Korea's tokenization market, Optimism and Uniswap Labs plan to enable direct cross-chain transfers of native ETH between OP Mainnet and Unichain on December 15. This proposal is currently awaiting approval through on-chain governance voting.
How Protocol Fees Translate into OP Buybacks
Gas fees paid by OP Mainnet users consist of four components: base fees, priority fees, Ethereum L1 data publishing fees, and operator fees.
After covering necessary data availability costs to the Ethereum mainnet, the chain transfers all net profits to the Collective treasury;
while member chains of the Superchain are required to pay either 2.5% of their total protocol revenue or 15% of their net profit (whichever is higher).
On Unichain, various fee treasuries inject funds into the FeeSplitter contract, which refunds L1 costs to chain operators proportionally, allocates a specified share to Optimism, and assigns the remainder to Uniswap Labs.
Meanwhile, OP Enterprise corporate clients pay technical support and operational service fees directly to the Optimism Foundation.
Figure: Flow of Optimism protocol fees and the architectural mechanism for monthly OP token buyback execution
Each month, a full half of the Collective's total protocol revenue will be used to repurchase OP tokens via over-the-counter (OTC) transactions within established execution windows, disregarding price volatility.
The Collective will securely store the repurchased OP tokens in the treasury, where future community governance may decide to burn them, allocate them to fund ecosystem growth, or distribute dividends as rewards to holders participating in network security staking.
The buyback funded by Q1 revenue utilized 513.9 ETH to acquire 9.45 million OP tokens; the fourth tranche comprising 4.94 million OP tokens was also successfully settled on October 1.
As of October 27, the Collective treasury's cumulative holdings of 14.39 million OP tokens account for 0.63% of the total circulating supply.
The tightening pace on the token supply side is equally significant.
For the year ending in April 2026, the Governance Fund released only 13.4 million new OP tokens to the market (compared to 28.7 million the prior year), Retro Funding issued 14.2 million (versus 20.3 million the prior year), and airdrop issuances dropped to zero.
Additionally, upon concluding its original revenue-sharing arrangement, Base voluntarily forfeited the entire unvested portion of its 118 million OP funding allocation.
Currently, service fees paid by OP Enterprise corporate clients flow directly into the Foundation. As the Foundation restructures and optimizes the Collective's legal entity framework, officials are exploring ways to similarly integrate this substantial corporate cash flow into the token buyback pool.
Market Valuation Pricing for the Superchain
Based on the scale of locked assets protected and hosted by the tech stack, OP's current trading valuation multiple is less than one-fifth of ARB's.
As of the close on September 30, the market assigned a fully diluted valuation (FDV) of only $25.5 million for every $1 billion of on-chain assets locked within the OP Stack;
in contrast, for the 18 Arbitrum ecosystem chains tracked by L2BEAT (including Robinhood Chain), ARB commands a valuation of up to $140.4 million for every $1 billion of locked assets.
Figure: Comparison of FDV multiples for OP and ARB relative to their respective ecosystem locked values
Even after completely excluding the massive Base, OP's valuation multiple remains significantly lower than ARB's:
Measuring solely against the $5.8 billion in locked assets carried by the remaining OP Stack chains, OP's FDV corresponding to every $1 billion in protected assets is $96 million, roughly two-thirds of ARB's valuation multiple.
On October 27, OP closed at $0.1118, marking a cumulative 36.4% increase from the periodic low of $0.0820 set on August 18;
Its 30-day average price also continuously recovered from $0.089 on August 20 to $0.134 on October 21.
Figure: Daily closing price and 30-day moving average trend for OP, rebounding over 36% from the August 18 low
Scenario Analysis: How Much OP Can Enterprise Service Fees Repurchase
Currently, buyback budgets primarily rely on network revenue sharing.
Out of the 1,115 ETH in total revenue recorded by the Collective from January to September, Base contributed 849 ETH (all paid in full before March).
Since April, half of the monthly average revenue amounts to approximately $29,500; calculated at the October 27 closing price of $0.1118, these funds could annually repurchase OP tokens equivalent to 0.14% of the circulating supply in the secondary market.
Figure: Scenario analysis of the proportion of OP buybacks to circulating supply under varying token prices and annual enterprise fee scales
However, the inclusion of OP Enterprise service fees will fundamentally reconstruct the scale of buybacks.
If following existing revenue-sharing conventions to allocate half of enterprise service fees toward token buybacks, every $5 million increase in annual fees would result in an additional near-1% repurchase of circulating OP each year.
Should enterprise service fees reach the $15.3 million revenue level achieved by the Collective in 2025, the annual buyback ratio will soar to 3.1% of the circulating supply.
The Foundation plans to inject 272.9 million OP tokens into the circulating market over the year ending in April 2027, the vast majority of which stem from ecosystem development funds directly tied to OP Enterprise business expansion and OP Mainnet ecosystem prosperity.
Optimism has successfully transformed the foundational code driving 54 mainnet chains into a mature commercialized service that attracts paying clients such as Kraken, Sony, Uniswap Labs, and Coinbase.
For OP, the next core focal point lies in whether the entity legal restructuring can swiftly finalize the allocation directions for these enterprise-level service fees.
The full-scale kickoff of the Korean market on February 4, alongside the planned December 15 launch of Superchain-native cross-chain interoperability between Optimism and Uniswap Labs, will collectively demonstrate the remarkable expansion speed of this corporate client roster to the market.