I looked at the table of profit and ecological data for @Optimism Superchain over the past year and extracted a few key indicators to share:
1) As of now, OP Superchain has a total revenue of 15,849 ETH, of which @base contributes 2,878 ETH. The revenue composition is: OP Mainnet's on-chain net profit + 15% of on-chain net profit sharing from OP Stack chains / 2.5% of total revenue); as this data does not have direct comparative income data from other L2s, I will not comment.
2) The OP Superchain ecosystem has expanded to 35 chains, including 33 L2s and 2 L3s; the statistics may not be complete, as more than half have not launched yet, but the rapid development speed of OP Stack is evident.
3) The Base chain is the best-performing chain in the Superchain ecosystem, with daily transactions of 6.9M and monthly transactions of 205M, equivalent to 10 times the 22M of OP Mainnet. It is clear that the decision to include Base under the Superchain has been very successful.
4) In April, when the market was good, Superchain's monthly revenue was 1,189 ETH, with Base accounting for 48.4%, OP Mainnet for 51%, and other chains totaling 0.6%; it can be seen that the strategic effect of OP Stack is currently evident on the Base chain, while other L2 alliances have yet to rise.
5) The Base chain contributes 48.4% of the revenue to the Superchain, accounting for only 15% of its total revenue, while the OP Mainnet contributes 51%, which is its entire net profit. This shows that the actual revenue from the Base chain is quite considerable, roughly over 6 times that of OP Mainnet.
Overall, this data can truly reflect the current development status of OP SuperChain, which is still in the early stages, with only the Base chain operational and other chains still in their infancy.
Strangely, this table does not specify the expenditure situation of OP Superchain; we can estimate it roughly through other public data.
Recently, OP also provided 25 million OP tokens to Kraken to develop the new OP Stack Layer 2 network Ink, which is quite a large investment. Its six rounds of RetroFund have also distributed over 60M OP tokens, and its commitment to the Base network accounts for 2.75% of the total supply of OP tokens (distributed over six years), along with occasional sponsorships or resource exchanges for specific networks. This part of the expenditure is quite substantial: (the following is a rough estimate, not accurate and for reference only)
The investment in incentives for developers and the community ecosystem is not counted here; let's take Base as an example to calculate an investment and output account.
Investment: 4.3 billion OP * 2.75% = 118 million OP % 6 = 20 million OP / year; Revenue: Contributed 2,500 ETH in the past year (since Base launched 15 months ago, totaling 2,878 ETH minus 3 months of revenue). Based on the current prices of ETH and OP, roughly estimated, this amounts to an investment of $30 million for a return of $6.25 million.
Literally comparing, it is definitely a 'losing money' business. Of course, if the OP Foundation does not consider the $OP expenditure as a 'cost'...
I have never understood why Layer 2 has fallen into a development stalemate; this problem is too difficult to solve, but by observing the details, the problem may lie in these data details.
