The big outstanding question is around business model. Superchain – once increasing levels of interoperability are implemented – is a good product design. But we would like to see more thought into the business design since this has to be financially sustainable.
Assuming technical interoperability comes sooner rather than later, the big longterm question is what benefit do OP tokenholders see from dilution-financing hundreds of millions of dollars in grants and investments on chains outside of Optimism mainnet?
In our opinion, sequencer revenue sharing is a melting ice cube – it will trend towards zero over time. We do believe Optimism needs to avoid being locked into a strategy where this is the only way to monetize a relationship with Superchain members. It would shock us if Superchain members themselves are not already debating how to ultimately monetize their chains in ways that are unrelated to the sequencer fees.
Unfortunately, this is a topic that needs to be settled now – so that Superchain members are understanding of what the longterm relationship with Optimism will be, and so that OP tokenholders are still entitled to a share of the financial success of other chains even if sequencer fees become inconsequential. If we were to launch an L2, we would certainly sign up for Superchain membership for access to grants, future interoperability, etc, and would absolutely have a plan other than sequencer fees to realize a return.
As very large blocks of grants flow out to Superchain members from both the Foundation and the Grants Council, this needs to be a settled question: What is in this for OP holders if the member chains have – by design or necessity – close to no sequencer fees?
We understand this post was a product vision rather than a business strategy, but it needs to be set in the context of financial reality. Tokenholders need to see a plan to navigate through that reality without endless dilution of the OP token to finance what could be competitor chains if either the technical (via interop) and economic (via revenue sharing agreements) are not executed upon perfectly.