As of 02:04 Beijing time on September 15, 2026, my core judgment is: Optimism’s project value holds. The OP Stack and Superchain have already formed verifiable infrastructure adoption and revenue; and OP’s token value has also improved from pure governance to an “income buyback plus experimental staking use-case.” However, the buyback coins are not burned, OP Mainnet’s own operating scale is weaker than that of top competitors, and in the coming year token supply issuance could be significantly greater than the buybacks. Therefore, it is more suitable to build positions in small increments within price ranges rather than mistakenly treating a lower price as low risk simply because it is far below previous highs.
The current price in this round is $0.103863, which is within my designated observation zone of $0.10 to $0.12. For a new position, you can first invest 20% of the planned total; you should not buy it all at once just because the price has fallen a lot from its historical peak. For existing holdings, the main approach is to hold and control single-token concentration. Decide whether to add 50% only when it reaches the core zone of $0.075 to $0.095. Only if it drops to $0.045 to $0.065 and the fundamentals have not deteriorated should you consider the final 30%. The probability-weighted fair value is about $0.163. The odds are there, but the opportunity comes from value capture just beginning to start, and the risk also comes from the fact that it has not yet matured.
## It’s no longer just one Layer 2 chain
What Optimism initially solved was the problem of expensive Ethereum transactions and limited throughput. Today, a more accurate framing is that it’s a scaling infrastructure built on OP Stack as the technical foundation, Superchain as a multi-chain network, and OP Enterprise as a commercial product. OP Mainnet is still a public network for users and applications, but member chains such as Base, Unichain, Ink, World Chain, etc. mean the value of projects no longer depends only on transaction volume on a single chain.
The importance of this transition is that Optimism doesn’t need to keep all users and liquidity on OP Mainnet; it can still earn revenue from member chains. Member chains pay the Collective the higher of 2.5% of gross transaction fees or 15% of net transaction fee profits, while OP Mainnet remits all revenue. The more chains using OP Stack and the more actively they are used, the higher the revenue theoretically shared from the shared treasury.
The team and capital can support this long-term infrastructure path. The project evolved from early Plasma Group research. The core organizations include the Optimism Foundation, OP Labs, and ecosystem contributors. Cumulative funding disclosed historically is over $175 million, including a $150 million Series B led by a16z. Strong capital and major partners bring R&D, distribution, and enterprise customer resources, but it also leaves concentrated allocation: in the initial token supply, investors account for 17.1%, and early core contributors account for 18.9%.
## Who the real customers are, and who is paying
There are three categories of real customers. The first is applications and users that need low-cost, EVM-compatible block space. The second is chains that adopt OP Stack, run their own brands, and build an ecosystem. The third is enterprise customers that purchase hosted custody, and service-level commitments to provide support and services. The first two categories form fees through on-chain transactions; member chains then split those fees with the Collective as agreed. The third category helps the infrastructure move from open-source software further into enterprise services.
This demand is not confined to launch-stage presentations. OP Mainnet has already been running steadily. External risk assessments classify it as Stage 1; current total value secured is about $1.67 billion, with average daily user operations of about 13.26 transactions per second. Another definition that counts only DeFi locked value shows OP Mainnet at about $442 million TVL. These two definitions differ and cannot be mixed. Over the past year, OP Mainnet chain-level fees were about $1.22 million and chain-level revenue about $1.18 million, while Superchain revenue that includes member-chain splits is clearly much larger. Revenue disclosed for the past twelve months at the start of 2026 is 5,868 ETH; using this round’s ETH price of about $2,533 gives an estimate of about $14.86 million.
Competition is equally real. Using the same DeFi definition, Base’s TVL is about $5.673 billion and Arbitrum’s is about $1.402 billion—both higher than OP Mainnet. Optimism’s strengths are the open-source stack, EVM compatibility, a shared upgrade system, and network effects formed by large member chains. Its weakness is that member chains like Base have their own brands, users, and liquidity. A stronger Superchain does not automatically mean OP Mainnet and OP tokens will strengthen in the same proportion. Investing in OP must keep proving split revenue and token demand, rather than simply converting all member-chain transaction volume into OP’s operating results.
## Revenue starts flowing through to OP for the first time
OP’s most obvious past flaw was that users paid transaction fees in ETH, while OP was mainly used for governance—there was no hard linkage between network usage and returns for token holders. The 2026 buyback plan changes this: governance approved for 12 consecutive months that 50% of Superchain revenue be used to buy OP monthly, starting in February. As of August 6, cumulative buybacks have exceeded 9 million tokens.
This is a real, verifiable value-flow chain: more chain and enterprise adoption brings more transactions; member-chain splits increase; and half of the revenue becomes buy pressure for OP. Based on the last twelve months’ 5,868 ETH revenue and roughly converting using this round’s ETH price, the equivalent annualized buyback budget is about $7.43 million—roughly 3.1% of the current circulating market cap of about $239 million. If revenue grows, this ratio will rise as well.
But buybacks can’t be written as a burn. The repurchased OP goes into the Collective treasury; in the future it may still be used for ecosystem expansion, rewarding security participants, or even be burned depending on governance. It reduces immediate sell-side pressure in the market, but it does not permanently reduce total supply. At this stage, it should be viewed as the first step from revenue to token demand, not as a mature shareholder return mechanism.
OP has also surfaced a second possible use case: high-frequency block-space users can stake OP to obtain transaction ordering priority. A related time-limited experiment has been deployed on OP Mainnet, indicating OP may move from being a governance credential to becoming a block-space coordination asset. However, it is still a reversible experiment; enough long-term staked amounts, fee improvements, and user retention data have not been published, so valuation can only assign it limited weight.
## Supply pressure hasn’t gone away
OP’s initial total supply is 4,294,967,296 tokens. In the original allocation, the governance fund is 5.4%, the ecosystem fund is 19.6%, the airdrop is 19.0%, Retro Funding is 20.0%, early core contributors are 18.9%, and investors are 17.1%. As of September 4, 2026, the official circulating supply is 2,299,600,000 tokens, or 53.5% of the initial total. 2,633,200,000 tokens have been committed, or 61.3%.
The current practical inflation setting is 0%, but the MintManager contract retains the ability to mint up to 2% of the then-total supply per year. Governance can change the inflation arrangement later. More realistic near-term pressure isn’t new inflation; it’s that initial allocations and existing commitments continue entering circulation.
The official expectation is that by the end of April 2027, circulating supply will be about 2.5045 billion tokens—up by about 204.9 million (or 8.9%) from September 4. Of this, the ecosystem fund is expected to contribute about 200 million tokens; the remaining annual releases from early contributors and investors are relatively smaller. The official provides only rough fiscal-year projections, not a day-by-day or address-by-address unlock calendar. To assess pressure, I approximate the remaining fiscal years with a constant-pace model solely for stress testing: about 25.8 million tokens added over 30 days, about 77.5 million over 90 days, and about 154.9 million over 180 days. If the same mechanical speed is extended to one year, that implies about 314 million more tokens. The actual schedule will be determined by fund disbursements, vesting conditions, and governance—so these numbers cannot be treated as certain unlock dates.
Supply risk changed further in August. Governance reclassified 546.9 million tokens of unused airdrop quota into the strategic ecosystem fund to develop OP Mainnet and OP Enterprise. This adjustment does not increase total supply or circulating supply on that day, but it turns reserves equivalent to about 23.8% of current circulating supply into actively deployable growth capital. If the funds buy sustained TVL, enterprise customers, and fee generation, it will increase long-term value. If it only buys short-term incentives and partnership announcements, it is a huge potential source of dilution.
On-chain holdings are also highly concentrated. The largest address holds about 1.294 billion tokens; the second-largest Foundation address holds about 460 million tokens—about 30.1% and 10.7% of the initial total, respectively. The third-largest, about 262 million tokens, belongs to exchange custody addresses. Exchange balances represent many customers and can’t be treated as a single whale, but the first two treasury addresses and many unlabelled addresses suggest that fund movements, governance, and disclosure remain concentrated among a small number of organizations.
## Governance and security: there are checks and balances, but it still depends on key actors
Optimism uses a two-house structure: Token House and Citizens’ House. OP token holders, or representatives acting on their behalf, vote on protocol upgrades, capital allocation, and organizational matters. The other house represents chains, applications, and end users, providing checks against purely token-weighted voting. This is more complete than single-token governance, but the Foundation still manages the treasury and actual execution—ordinary token holders can’t decide where funds go item by item.
At the technical level, OP Mainnet has gone through multiple audits, bug bounties, and fault-proof post-mortems. Upgrades require joint participation by the Foundation and the Security Council; multisig and a security committee reduce single-point risks. At the same time, upgradeable contracts, Guardian pause permissions, centralized sequencers, and MintManager authority mean the system hasn’t fully minimized trust. Even though historic fault-proof vulnerabilities were disclosed and fixed, it also shows that as proving systems become more complex, implementation mistakes can’t be ignored.
The latest Upgrade 20 plan executes the Sepolia version first on September 17, then after governance approval and a seven-day stability observation period executes the mainnet version on September 24. It migrates fault proofs to the Super Root controversy game to pave the way for native interoperability, while strengthening upgrade sequencing and input checks. Here you must distinguish stages: it is currently a pending upgrade and a prerequisite for interoperability, not that interoperability has already been launched.
## Three valuation scenarios
OP has no statutory right to dividends, and buybacks only run for part of the cycle—so discounting stable cash flows would create false precision. I use a scenario market-cap method based on a common reference of about 2.5045 billion circulating supply at the end of April 2027, then cross-check it using Superchain revenue, buyback size, OP Mainnet’s competitive position, and supply discipline.
In the bear scenario, the probability is 35%. The target price is $0.06, corresponding to about $150 million in circulating market cap. The setup requires Superchain revenue to decline or buybacks to expire without renewal; the strategic fund increases circulating supply but does not create retention demand; and OP Mainnet continues to lag behind its main competitors.
In the base scenario, the probability is 45%. The target price is $0.16, corresponding to about $401 million in circulating market cap. It requires Superchain revenue to grow moderately, buybacks to be carried out largely as planned with renewals, circulating supply to track the official path closely, and enterprise customers and OP Mainnet usage to recover gradually.
In the optimistic scenario, the probability is 20%. The target price is $0.35, corresponding to about $877 million in circulating market cap. It requires a significant increase in Superchain revenue driven by interoperability and enterprise customers; OP to receive continuous safe staking or be used for ordering purposes; and strategic fund performance to show higher capital efficiency.
The fair value after weighting by the three probabilities is $0.163. Compared with the current price of $0.103863, there is about 57% theoretical upside, but that spread is not guaranteed return. The model is most sensitive to whether buybacks can be renewed, whether Superchain revenue can grow, and whether the roughly 200 million additional annual supply actually translates into enough real demand.
## What to do now
I split the OP planned position into three tiers. The base tier is always based on the coin’s planned total investment amount, not on the entire account’s assets.
- The observation zone is $0.10 to $0.12. Invest 20%, for a cumulative 20%. The current price is already within the range, so you can establish the first position.
- The core zone is $0.075 to $0.095. Add 50%, cumulative 70%. Only execute when the downside is mainly driven by market risk appetite, not by deterioration in revenue, buybacks, or governance discipline.
- The panic zone is $0.045 to $0.065. Add 30%, cumulative 100%. This tier must be satisfied while fundamentals have not failed. If buybacks are halted, supply gets out of control, or a major security event occurs, the low price is not a reason to buy.
Tiers that you have not reached remain uninvested. Don’t chase upward for existing positions that are not above the observation zone, and don’t speed up dilution just because the price is near historical lows. When entering lower price ranges, first re-check the current month’s buybacks, circulating supply, revenue, and security status before deciding whether to execute the remaining plan.
OP’s market liquidity is enough to support this staged approach. In this round, aggregated 24-hour trading volume is about $68.06 million, roughly 28% of circulating market cap. Main venues’ OP/USDT quotes cluster around $0.1038, implying a spread of about 0.09%. However, total network volume is not the same as single-order-book depth—large trades should still be limit orders and split up.
## What would prove this assessment wrong
If Superchain revenue and OP Mainnet’s real usage both decline at the same time for two consecutive quarters, and cannot be explained by one-off market volatility, I would downgrade my assessment of project quality. If buybacks are terminated early within 12 months, or there are two consecutive months with no execution for any justified reason, or if after expiry there is no equivalent value-capture arrangement, the token thesis would revert to something close to a pure governance asset.
Strategic ecosystem funds are another hard boundary. If, after two rounds of formal disclosures, you can only see token spending but cannot see retention TVL, enterprise customer growth, and fee growth, then the fund should be treated as dilution rather than an investment. If FY5 actual circulating supply is significantly higher than 2.5045 billion along the path, or if governance results in substantive inflation without corresponding demand, it would also overturn the current valuation.
Technically, any event that causes users to lose assets, long-term withdrawals to be blocked, key contracts to be maliciously upgraded, or governance control to fail is sufficient to stop subsequent tiers and reassess the holdings.
Next, the most worth tracking is not the token price itself, but the monthly Superchain revenue, the number of buybacks executed, and where the treasury funds go; the strategic fund’s cumulative deployments and the TVL, customers, and fees they generate; deviations of actual circulating supply from the official path; the real execution of Upgrade 20 and interoperability milestones; participation volume, fee outcomes, and impact on regular users from staking/ordering; and the TVL, transactions, and revenue gaps between OP Mainnet and Base/Arbitrum.
Finally, the conclusion is simple: Optimism has proven itself as mature infrastructure with products, customers, and revenue, and OP has finally appeared to deliver verifiable value transmission. But supply, governance, and execution will still determine whether this transmission truly stays with every token. You can start with observational holdings near $0.10, and only increase positions materially when there is more safety margin—or when buybacks, revenue, and supply discipline provide stronger evidence.
$OP