Optimism co-founder outlines new era for project that 'did too much and focused too little' amid brutal token price decline

Optimism co-founder Jing Wang said the Ethereum scaling project lost strategic discipline in recent years, telling followers that the team "did too much and focused too little" while its token price remained "in the gutter."

Like many Layer 2s, the price of Optimism's OP token has witnessed a brutal decline, collapsing around 93% from a peak of $4.69 in March 2024 to around $0.33 today, according to The Block's OP price page.

In a post on X late Wednesday, Wang said Optimism "massively over-hired without a clear strategy" and had been "bathing in tactics for a long time" as it clung to earlier successes.

Wang pointed to a string of high-profile OP Stack launches — including Base, Ink, Unichain, Worldchain, and Soneium — but said the organization failed to build the "operating machinery" needed to sustain momentum in what she described as a "dramatically different" market environment. Quoting Sun Tzu, she added: "Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat."

The co-founder said she previously attributed challenges to regulatory uncertainty, market noise, and the difficulty of coordinating more than three independent organizations, but argued those explanations "don't matter" anymore.

Instead, Optimism has been restructuring, including parting ways with "many talented teammates," unifying execution under a single entity, and rebuilding both its engineering and enterprise sales teams.

Renewed focus: 'OP Stack is going to beat them all'

Wang outlined a renewed focus on three goals: building scalable financial infrastructure, bringing enterprises and their assets onchain, and maximizing the productivity of those assets. 

She described enterprise blockchain adoption as increasingly competitive, citing Solana, Paradigm, and Stripe-backed Tempo, Arbitrum, and Avalanche among the platforms vying to win deals.

Despite that competition, Wang said she is confident "OP Stack is going to beat them all," arguing that it is "the only stack that has successfully brought and scaled multiple enterprises onchain." She attributed that advantage to lessons learned and by "wasting a lot of money," saying the team has observed "every single enterprise blockchain failure mode because we've been doing this longer than anyone else."

According to Wang, enterprises choose OP Stack because their expectations on scale and reliability exceed typical norms, and because the stack was co-developed "alongside the fastest growing enterprise in Web3: Base."

The OP Stack vision will win by balancing shared standards with chain autonomy, she said, framing the current moment as an inflection point for the project. "At the end of the day, enterprises want to control their own economics. They aren't gonna be sharecroppers on Stripe's blockchain."