Ink, a Kraken-incubated Ethereum Layer 2 built on the OP Stack, is upgrading to Optimism's OP Enterprise Fully Managed under a multi-year deal, the projects said Wednesday.
Under the deal, Optimism will operate Ink's production infrastructure while the Ink Foundation focuses on ecosystem growth and new financial products. In a statement shared exclusively with The Block, Optimism said the arrangement is one of the first instances of a major Layer 2 delegating infrastructure operations to a managed provider.
Launched in December 2024, Ink said it processed more than 1 million transactions in the first 24 hours after its mainnet went live, and applications built on the network now generate close to $40 million in annual revenue.
Ink will also serve as a design partner for OP Enterprise, Optimism's infrastructure offering for institutions and exchanges building onchain financial products. The roadmap includes programmable block building, one-day withdrawals to Ethereum, and sequencer-level compliance tooling, alongside performance targets of 400 megagas per second in guaranteed throughput and block times as low as 100 milliseconds by the end of 2026.
"Programmable financial infrastructure is becoming the foundation of how institutions build onchain, but operating that infrastructure requires a different set of expertise," Optimism CEO Jing Wang said in the statement. "By working together, the Ink Foundation can focus on growing the ecosystem while Optimism focuses on operating and improving the network."
Ink Foundation Head of Strategy Zach Le said running a blockchain in production is a "unique operational challenge" and that the foundation chose Optimism to operate the network because it built the stack Ink runs on. "The next phase of onchain finance demands a chain operated by those with the technical depth to prioritize reliability and security in everything they do," Le said.
Ink's move follows the launch of Bitpanda's Vision Chain, the first network deployed on OP Enterprise Fully Managed earlier this year. Optimism said adding Ink expands the managed tier to exchange-linked blockchain networks in the U.S. and Europe.
The deal also lands as usage across major optimistic rollups has pulled back from 2025 highs, with active addresses down from nearly 3 million a year ago to under 600,000 in recent weeks, according to The Block's data dashboard.
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