The outbound token
Optimism’s signature is spending OP on purpose: retroactive public-goods funding, builder grants, user incentives. The token is the ecosystem’s budget, distributed outward on the theory that subsidized activity becomes organic activity. It is the mirror image of ARB’s treasury-hoarding answer to the same accrual question — and like ARB, gas is paid in ETH, so neither token touches the fare box.
Subsidy flow is supply flow
Every grant round is distribution: tokens moving from a treasury to recipients whose reason for holding is weaker than their reason for funding operations. Incentive-driven activity also has a decay problem — usage bought with emissions tends to leave with the emissions, a pattern DeFi established years ago and L2 incentives re-run at chain scale.
The Superchain option
The bull structure is that OP governs a standard other chains adopt, making the token a claim on a federation rather than one network. That is a real option — and it is an option, with the burst-and-decay demand signature every governance-event asset shares.
Reading it
Watch grant cadence as scheduled supply, adoption announcements as the event tape, and funding for the leverage behind the current story. The ARB/OP relative trade is often cleaner than either leg alone — one question, two answers.