Optimism's first major client to come out of OP Stack was Coinbase's Base -- last year. But in recent months, additional projects have broken toward the ecosystem, with Uniswap, Sony and Kraken all sharing plans to deploy new layer-2 networks using the OP Stack.

It's a crucial development in the evolution of the broader blockchain universe, since layer-2 networks stand at the heart of developers' efforts to make transactions faster and cheaper in the Ethereum ecosystem. Ethereum, while the second-largest blockchain after Bitcoin, is currently the leading smart-contracts network -- meaning it can handle programs and support applications -- and it has become the dominant home for decentralized exchanges and lending platforms. Layer-2 blockchains work like auxiliary networks atop Ethereum, providing a venue for transactions to be executed quickly and at a low cost, and then settled down to the base chain.