Still haven’t seen anyone who is in favor of this proposal (if you can call this a proposal with so little effort put into the proposal post) answer the question you and others have asked what advantage/value this will bring. Other than ‘price will go up’, which will not be the case as the $OP collected as gas will need to be sold to pay for $ETH to pay mainnet fees, putting downward pressure on price.
Seems like a lot of people here do not know what EVM equivalence is and how rollups work.
Users preferring to stick with ETH gas payments do not have to do anything, but using $OP will result in a 25% gas fee discount!
How does this work? The fees you pay on Optimism are used directly to pay for gas to post proofs/data onto Ethereum L1. So if you give a discount of 25% on gas fees paid in $OP, Optimism will be operating at a loss, effectively subsidising your gas costs. Where is the benefit in that for Optimism?
Additional benefits:
Increased trading volume for $OP
Increase the total market cap with the usage of $Op tokens as Gass
Increase the price of the $OP.
$Op will be traded in Eth and L1 markets.
These arguments are all about the same thing: price go up. Which is a bad argument for a governance token and will not even be the case as Optimism will need to sell the $OP collected as gas fees to cover mainnet fees.
Makes it easier for bridging.
Bridging what? $OP is a token native to optimism and doesn’t exist or have any utility on other (L1/L2) networks. Also all bridges currently support bridging ETH to and from optimism, not $OP. So how does it make bridging easier?
Eliminates the need to bridge both $ETH and $OP for network usage
This is solving an issue that does not exist. There is no need to bridge both ETH and $OP to use optimism, you just need ETH.
I understand this proposal is motivated by a wish to increase the OP price. The price is a function of supply+demand. We can ignore supply for this proposal and only focus on demand. Demand for OP will likely come from two sources:
Staking demand to earn sequencer revenues
Reservation demand, e.g. as a money-like instrument or gas token
Sequencer revenue is primarily a function of providing the best possible UX to Optimism devs/users. Forcing users to hold OP would improve the reservation demand but at the cost of much worse UX - ultimately hurting demand more than helping it.
Instead, I think the natural endgame is for all execution layers to abstract away fees entirely and let users pay in one of many major tokens, pay from a secondary account, pay from the output of their trades, or with MEV, etc. This is the best possible UX and this will maximize usage of Optimism and ultimately demand for the OP token more than any other strategy.
Exactly. From the protocol level fees should be paid in a sustainable way. From the execution level (for people not familiar, let’s just say dapps and wallets) fees can be paid however the dapp/wallet wants.
Back in 2018/2019 some wallets and dapps abstracted fees to the point of completely subsidizing them. New users didn’t know about the network fee but obviously the gas crisis made this solutions unsustainable and obsolete. It doesn’t mean we can’t go back to something similar but this UX solutions need to be sustainable (or even profitable, they need to extract the underlying tx cost somehow).
