Optimism offers to use 50% of Superchain earnings to buy back OP Tokens
Optimism Foundation has floated a major shake-up in the volatility of its layer 2 OP token, urging it to allocate 50% of Superchain's revenue to regular purchases of the asset.
Optimism Grants Council member Michael Vander Meiden shared his thoughts via X on Thursday, saying, “After years of being a ‘useless government token', the value of the OP token will finally be tied to network activity.
The proposal was first presented on Wednesday at the Optimism Management Forum. It outlines a plan to direct 50% of SuperChain's revenue into the token treasury towards monthly Optimist (OP) purchases.
“These tokens can be burned or distributed as the platform evolves. Management will control the parameters that govern the purchase and the token treasury,” Optimism Foundation said.
Optimism wants to increase OP utility beyond management
The move is part of a push to expand OP's services beyond primarily management to something “tightly aligned with Superchain's growth” and could provide a big boost to OP owners and developers in the ecosystem.
“As Superchain evolves, the token can take on additional functions aligned with the network's long-term decentralization and resilience, including maintaining shared infrastructure, coordinating chain rotation, and enabling shared governance over core protocol functions,” Optimism Foundation said.
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The proposal addresses the need to revamp the OP to reflect the evolution of Optimism from being an “experiment” in the Ethereum scale to the ecosystem's large scale generalization of Layer 2 activity.
“Superchain holds a 61.4% L2 payment market share and handles 13% of all crypto transactions, and that share continues to grow. The OP token should match that pace and growth,” the team said.
The Optimum Superchain was launched in February 2023 and consists of a network of Layer-2 (L2) chains based on the project's open-source OP stack. The ecosystem hosts chains such as Unichain, Ink and Coinbase's L2 Base.
The OP token had a rough 2025, with its price down about 83%. The price is yet to increase on the proposal news this week.
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