We begin a new series of inquisition around what Optimism has called The Superchain. The fundamental questions are:

1. What is it?

2. What are the value props?

3. Who is part of it?

4. Why/will more join?

Our more nuanced curiosities are about Base, Zora Network, and Optimism itself. Some questions I’m interested in are:

1. What do the individual collectives offer?

2. How do they comprise the superchain?

3. Where/what are the opportunities for those of us here?

Getting Started

If you’d like to read the essay for yourself:

The TLDR is:

• OP stack (their codebase) is open source and viewed as a public good

• the initial goal is to align L2 proliferation with an interoperable foundation

• the manifestation of this goal is called the superchain

In the long term, the Superchain can blossom into a sprawling network which maximizes interoperability, shares decentralized protocols, and standardizes its core primitives–all while funding the public goods which enable it.

What we are dealing with is an attempt at the next-internet’s infrastructure. While it’s standard tradition for markets to incubate a zero-sum competitive framework, a superchain looks to not only establish, but find sustainable revenue models for a positive-sum competitive framework.

As stated in the above article, Base “will commit a portion of transaction fee revenue back to an Optimism Collective treasury.” In this vein, the success of a competing L2 is tied into the success of its competition.

What is curious at present, is how modular composability of divergent L2 ecosystems:

• look

• integrate

• and foster adoption