Op Labs’ CEO said the move was not about finances, and that the firm has “years of runway.”
The development company behind Ethereum Layer 2 network Optimism has laid off 20 employees — what appears to be approximately 20% of its team. The news was announced by OP Labs CEO and Optimism co-founder Jing Wang in an X post today, March 12, and included a screenshot of an internal Slack message Wang had sent to staff earlier in the day.
“This decision reflects a narrowing of our focus, not our runway,” Wang wrote on X.
In a Slack message to what appears to be Op Labs’ 102 employees, Wang said that the decision is “not about finances” but rather about “doing fewer things well, making decisions faster, and reducing coordination overhead.”
Op Labs’ CEO also noted in the Slack messaged that OP Labs “is well capitalized with years of runway.”
The OP token fell slightly on the news, down 2.4% in the past 24 hours, per The Defiant’s price page, while the broader market is flat today.
Last month, Coinbase’s Base — which was reportedly contributing an estimated 97% of Superchain revenue — announced it was departing the OP Stack for a self-managed codebase, sending OP down 26% in a single day. Wang acknowledged the blow but said evolving the business model was overdue.
On the product side, Optimism launched OP Enterprise in January and also passed a governance vote to direct 50% of Superchain revenue toward OP token buybacks.
This article was written with the assistance of AI workflows. All our stories are curated, edited and fact-checked by a human.
Source: https://thedefiant.io/news/blockchains/optimism-developer-op-labs-cuts-20-of-staff
