The Optimism Foundation has proposed a significant overhaul of OP token economics, suggesting that half of the Superchain’s revenue be used for regular buybacks of the token.
Optimism Grants Council member Michael Vander Meiden shared the idea on X on Thursday, noting that after years of functioning largely as a governance-only asset, OP’s value would finally be directly linked to network activity.
First posted to the Optimism governance forum on Wednesday, the proposal calls for allocating 50% of incoming Superchain revenue to monthly OP buybacks, with the repurchased tokens flowing back into the protocol’s token treasury.
According to the foundation, these tokens could later be burned or redistributed as staking rewards as the ecosystem matures, while governance would maintain control over the parameters governing buybacks and treasury management.
Optimism is seeking to expand the role of its OP token beyond governance, positioning it as an asset more closely tied to the growth and success of the Superchain.
The initiative is part of a broader effort to align OP with the expansion of the Superchain ecosystem, potentially delivering meaningful benefits to token holders and builders. According to the Optimism Foundation, the token could eventually gain additional functions that support long-term decentralization and network resilience, including helping secure shared infrastructure, coordinating sequencer rotation, and enabling collective governance over core protocol operations.
The proposal also stresses the need to recalibrate OP’s role to reflect Optimism’s evolution from an early Ethereum scaling experiment into a major layer-2 ecosystem. The foundation noted that the Superchain now accounts for 61.4% of the L2 fee market and processes roughly 13% of all crypto transactions, with those figures continuing to climb. “The OP token should be aligned with that momentum and growth,” the team said.
Launched in February 2023, Optimism’s Superchain is a network of layer-2 chains built using the open-source OP Stack, and includes projects such as Unichain, Ink, and Coinbase’s L2 Base.
Despite these ambitions, OP endured a difficult 2025, with its price falling nearly 83%. The token has yet to show a meaningful rebound this week following news of the proposal.
