Liam Horne

Future of OP Labs

Today I’m proud to share that my longtime friend and Optimism co-founder, Karl Floersch, will assume the role of CEO of OP Labs. In this role, Karl will be responsible for leading the company, defining its vision, and working with our amazing team to establish and execute the strategies necessary to decentralize Optimism and build the Superchain.

In our pursuit to build Optimism, we have consistently charted our own course. A core principle we have emphasized is the modularity and flexibility of the open-source OP Stack, welcoming external contributions since the very beginning. With Karl at the helm of OP Labs, we are set to renew our focus and double down on protocol development and engineering, empowering more projects to emerge and flourish within the Optimism ecosystem on top — ultimately laying the groundwork for Ethereum to scale, and towards a rollup-centric future.

As for myself, I will maintain a close working relationship with Karl, concentrating on vision, strategy, and execution in an advisory capacity at OP Labs. The transition will enable me to direct more attention towards the burgeoning ecosystem of projects and businesses building on top of the OP Stack or intending to join the Superchain ecosystem in the future. I’ll also delve deeply into how the Ethereum developer landscape might change with the growth of Optimism and Layer Twos more broadly, for instance in helping design an expanded L2 EVM specification and further understanding the implications of modular Ethereum clients designed for Layer Two such as reth.

I want to express my deepest gratitude to the incredible team at OP Labs for their unwavering dedication and hard work. Although it is bittersweet, I am immensely grateful for my experiences at OP Labs and so proud of the remarkable team that we have assembled. I take pride in our collective achievements and have full confidence that the team will continue to push the boundaries of what is possible in the Ethereum ecosystem.

My heartfelt thanks also goes out to everyone else who has been a part of this journey thus far. When I joined two years ago, we were a handful of dreamers with big ambitions, working out of a house on Venice Beach on a path towards mainnet. We’ve come an extraordinarily long way since then. I am looking forward to supporting projects building on the OP Stack, towards the Superchain vision, and ultimately towards a future where the entire world goes onchain thanks to the work we’ve done here.