This episode of Empire features Carl and Ben, two of the three co-founders of OP Labs, the team behind the Optimism blockchain and the OP Stack. The conversation is hosted at Blockworks and covers the full arc of Optimism's evolution from a research-driven Ethereum scaling project into an enterprise blockchain infrastructure business.

The discussion opens with a candid post-mortem on the L2 reckoning — why chains that launched on hype without differentiated products saw their floors fall out — before pivoting to how Optimism repositioned around an enterprise SaaS model. Carl and Ben walk through their customer list of centralized exchanges, the mechanics of their full-stack chain-in-a-box offering, and the cultural shift required to sell to institutions rather than crypto-native communities.

The conversation also covers Ethereum's identity crisis and competitive positioning versus Bitcoin, the Hyperliquid versus Solana debate, the psychological weight of holding a publicly traded token, and the practical pitfalls of AI-assisted engineering. Carl and Ben are characteristically optimistic throughout, arguing that composable, no-compromises block space remains the long-term destination for all of Web3.

The L2 Reckoning: Hype Meets Product Reality

The core failure of the L2 boom was treating chain launches as a shortcut to the 'hot new validator set' cycle rather than building differentiated products: 'You can't just launch a chain, launch a token, and then throw up your hands when nothing happens' - Carl

Ben framed the deflation positively: crypto lost the ability to avoid accountability, which was necessary to attract serious institutions — 'we finally reached a point where people outside of our little bubble were taking us seriously'

The technology evolution follows a bespoke → standardized → specialized arc. L2s are now enabling specialized block space customization in a product cycle of months rather than 5-10 year R&D cycles, unlike the earlier bespoke era.

What L2s got right: extending L1 capabilities and differentiating block space. What they got wrong: 100 identical clones all claiming to be general-purpose block space 'for all things to all people' — which is not differentiated and nobody wants.

Optimism's Enterprise SaaS Pivot: Chains as a Product

Optimism now operates an enterprise managed offering called OP Enterprise, where customers pay for a full-stack chain deployment without handling technical infrastructure — 'hey, I want a chain, and we say, don't worry, we got you' - Ben

The full-stack deliverable includes: sequencer hosting, block explorer, compliance modules, RPC provider agreements, wallet-as-a-service integrations, and optional native DeFi primitives like lending and DEX — collapsing a 9-month onboarding process to a few weeks.

Revenue is now majority enterprise SaaS contracts, with on-chain fees from OP Mainnet serving as a historical bridge. The team is approximately 90 people.

Optimism chose enterprise SaaS pricing over fee-sharing specifically for legibility: 'If we're going to say we're going to take a percentage cut of all of your MEV, people are going to be looking at us like we are crazy' - Carl

The customer lifecycle has three stages: deploy on OP Mainnet first, then graduate to a managed full-stack chain, then — for large teams like Coinbase/Base — fork the open-source stack and fully customize independently.

Enterprise Customer Wins: Exchanges Lead the Way

Confirmed enterprise chain customers include Coinbase (Base), Kraken (Ink), OKX, Bitpanda, Upbit, and Giwa — representing greater than 50% of all L2 transactions running on the OP Stack.

Coinbase/Base was the clarifying deal that forced professionalization: the team learned enterprises need SLAs, SLOs, and legible contracts — not crypto-native jargon-filled deal structures.

Bitpanda is launching the first L2 with a euro stablecoin as the native gas token, with a full MiCA compliance suite built directly into the sequencer — compliance controls applied at the sequencer level prevent tokens from reaching non-compliant wallets.

Beyond exchanges, the next fastest-growing segments are expected to be fintechs and traditional financial institutions. Carl named NYSE, NASDAQ, and ICE as institutions actively making crypto investments: 'it's really a matter of when'

Incentive payments to win deals are 'on the way out' — losing a deal purely on payment size is now viewed as a positive signal: 'that means you are not incurring this massive debt on your balance sheet' - Carl

Why Build a Chain? The Block Space Specialization Thesis

Having your own chain lets enterprises customize block space, control compliance, and own their user experience — analogous to owning your own website versus renting space on someone else's platform.

Today, deploying to your own L2 reduces interoperability versus deploying a smart contract on Ethereum L1 — but Carl argues this is 'a bug, not a feature' that will be solved technically, enabling full interop while maintaining chain sovereignty.

Not everyone needs a chain today — OP Mainnet serves as a launching pad. EtherFi migrated its card business and 200 million in assets to OP Mainnet without needing a dedicated chain.

Block space specialization differs by use case: 'a chain for an asset issuer versus a chain for a lending protocol is going to end up looking like very different things' - Ben, comparing it to the difference between a big data backend server and a live video streaming server.

Ethereum's Identity: Store of Value, Not Everything Chain

Carl's hot take: Ethereum's primary competitor is Bitcoin, not Solana — 'It is a decentralized store of value, maximally distributed, maximally credibly neutral' and that is where the two networks compete directly.

The framing that Ethereum must compete with Solana and Hyperliquid is, in Carl's view, 'a Solana psyop' — a divide-and-conquer strategy that confuses Ethereum's product positioning and sets it up to lose by trying to be everything.

The correct division: Ethereum L1 pursues decentralization, credible neutrality, and security. L2s like Optimism compete in the differentiated block space market against Solana, Hyperliquid, and others.

Ben's red flag condition: Ethereum would only be in trouble if it sacrificed decentralization and sound money properties in pursuit of ecosystem growth — 'I don't see Ethereum doing that, but if it did start doing that, that would be where I start raising red flags'

Lessons from Hyperliquid, Solana, and Enshrined DeFi

Hyperliquid demonstrated that a competitive, high-quality exchange experience can be built on-chain — 'de-risking that surface area to provide even more sophisticated on-chain products that maybe people wouldn't have thought were possible previously' - Carl

Solana's decision to enshrine token primitives natively into the chain — rather than treating everything as smart contracts — is a compelling specialization model that Carl says Ethereum probably wasn't ready for at its genesis.

On Hyperliquid vs. Solana in 5 years: both founders lean Hyperliquid, but note the question itself repeats a cycle crypto has watched many times — the deeper question is where equilibrium settles across a multi-chain ecosystem.

Token Psychology, Governance, and the Public Company Problem

Having a token is 'a great thing overall' for capitalization, but watching the price chart is 'absolutely brutal' — Jing, a team member, went years without checking the price as a coping mechanism.

Ben warned against the failure mode of becoming laser-focused on token price: 'that's not a way to build a sustainable business... it's good in the short term, it's bad in the long term'

On investor relations and quarterly calls for token holders: 'Not the right time. Got to stay focused. Got to make the actual business that is the underlying promise of all of crypto actually real' - Carl

AI Engineering: The 0-to-1 Trap and Moving Slow to Move Fast

The danger of agentic coding and vibe coding is the false sense of progress: 'the zero to one is so dang fast... I'm gonna just do that 100 more times and now I'm at 100' — but that produces massive technical debt, not real progress - Ben

Ben's framework: in traditional software engineering, you rewrite code multiple times before being proud of it. AI produces 1000x the code volume, but the bottleneck shifts to the engineer's own comprehension and confidence in what was built.

'Move slow to move fast is still true of AI. It's just that the moving slow is about your own comprehension and confidence in what is being built in the first place' - Ben

Carl has spent the last 6 months deep in engineering, rethinking how software is developed and secured given new AI tooling — shipping ambitious features that require hands-on attention to pipelines and processes.

Resources Mentioned

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you know, 6 months. But before that, totally different. So, I mean, I'm also in a little bit of a research journey right now. I think the— so where are the customers coming? No, we have a very good

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ining all of these insights and, you know, piecing it together. And to be clear, like the important research that I think that crypto has to solve right now is understanding or coming to terms with th

in what it looks like to be a successful chain

n't, but they could if they want to. Yeah. And it's amazing that they can. And that is a real case study in what it looks like to be a successful chain. What do you think of some of these? Um, anythi