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“Holy shit, my AI agents are too good” Here’s the part we don’t tell you 😭

Today we shared difficult news with the OP Labs team. Our priority was to communicate with the impacted people & give the team time to process the news before sharing publicly. This decision reflects a narrowing of our focus, not our runway. I’m sharing the note I sent to the team earlier today, and I strongly encourage teams across the ecosystem to reach out to the people leaving OP Labs because they are talented engineers, operators, and builders who helped build Optimism into what it is today. If you are genuinely hiring, feel free to shoot me a DM with your open roles and I will make introductions (with dual consent).

I’ve been wanting to talk about this for a while. The truth is… Optimism did too much and focused too little. We massively over-hired without a clear strategy. And token price is in the gutter. We’ve been bathing in tactics for a long time, clinging to previous successes like launching Base, Ink, Unichain, Worldchain, Soneium… without building the operating machinery to continue that momentum into a market that’s dramatically different today. Sun Tzu says: “Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” For a long time, I rationalized our difficulties as due to regulatory uncertainty, market noise, and the impossibility of coordinating 3+ independent organizations. But at this point, doesn’t matter. The world today is vastly different than when Optimism started. So we’ve been upgrading Optimism for this new world. We’ve parted ways with many talented teammates, re-unified execution under a single entity, and re-built our engineering and enterprise sales orgs. The goal is simple: 1. Build the most scalable financial infrastructure 2. Bring enterprises and their assets onchain 3. Maximize the productivity of those assets Enterprise deals are now a competitive space. When we talk to these enterprises, we see Solana, Tempo, Arbitrum, Avalanche, all trying to help enterprises come onchain. But I’m confident OP Stack is going to beat them all. Why? The OP Stack is the only stack that has successfully brought & scaled multiple enterprises onchain. We’ve seen what works & what doesn’t work. We’ve earned this knowledge by—honestly—wasting a lot of money. We’ve seen every single enterprise blockchain failure mode because we’ve been doing this longer than anyone else. Here’s why enterprises consistently end up choosing OP Stack: enterprises’ expectations on scale and reliability are far beyond what Web3 is used to, and the OP Stack is the closest to what enterprises need. That’s not a coincidence - we’ve co-developed this infrastructure alongside the fastest growing enterprise in web3: Base. At the end of the day, enterprises want to control their own economics. They aren't gonna be sharecroppers on Stripe's blockchain. The OP Stack vision will win. Shared standards balanced with chain autonomy. The starting gun is now. See you in the ring.