You know what? I’m genuinely curious why Base is staying in the Superchain and not leaving to be a ZK L2, maybe with STARK tech that’s now super efficient and cheap. Base has increased their block gas limit multiple times to be more than 3x their Superchain counterparts like OP and Unichain, and it’s filling blocks up to 30% on average, meaning that it’s getting about 45-50M gas filled up every block, or 25Mgas/s (so first of all it doesn’t really need that much gas limit, but okay). It’s also not really cheap, with an avg gas of 0.0037 ( if you compare it with other L2s, but still it gets a lot of traction because.. you know, distribution. So, all in all, they’re making a ton of money. Base pays to Optimism the greater of: - 2.5% of its total revenue, or - 15% of its on-chain profit. Given: - Revenue = $180,000/day - Profit = $175,000/day, Then: - 2.5% of revenue = 0.025 × 180,000 = $4,500/day - 15% of profit = 0.15 × 175,000 = $26,250/day Since $26,250 is greater than $4,500, Base would pay approximately **$26,250 per day** to Optimism as part of the Superchain fee share. So they’re giving away 14,5% of their revenue or 15% of their profits away. And they’re doing it because Base has been paid to be part of the Optimism Superchain. They will receive up to 2.75% of the OP token supply over six years as an incentive for participating in the Superchain. This amounts to up to about 118 million OP tokens, which is roughly 9 milion dollars at today’s price. Base has so far contributed with around 6800 ETH back to Optimism, which is 30M dollars at current price. Since Base contributed this amount in about 2.5 years, it means that if ETH and OP stay flat, Base will be economically incentivized to move out of the Superchain in about 5 years, while if things go like they did in the past (so ETH going generally up and OP staying generally flat or going up less than ETH), it could be much less. IMHO, this will happen in less than 2 years, if Base keeps this throughput or increases it even. For those thinking about Base becoming an L1, I don’t think it’s the best choice for them. They don’t want to manage their own security, and they still will want to settle to Ethereum, so their best way would be to move to ZKSync or Starknet. But, but, but.. it’s possible that all this line of thought is wrong, because even optimistic Rollups will prove blocks/txs with ZK in the future (we’re seeing Succint doing very good things), and that OP will reduce their contribution rate or change some governance variable in the future. I don’t know what happens, but politics and money is becoming more and more center-stage now that tech is solidifying. Everything crypto is now becoming a power&money open bidding, similar to what we’re seeing with USDH on Hyperliquid.