Optimism (OP) suffered a sharp 23% decline on February 18, 2026, accumulating 28% today, after Base revealed it was transitioning from the OP Stack to its own independent technological infrastructure. This change was necessary for faster development and less of a challenge in moving to a “base/base” stack.
— wilson.base.eth (@WilsonCusack) February 18, 2026A new, unified stack for Base Chain
Excited to share that we are evolving our technical roadmap, consisting of our own spec, code, and infra to accelerate the foundation of Base. This shift gives us the autonomy to ship protocol improvements more frequently and focus our…
Why the Transition from Base to Base was Bad for OP
Base was established as an OP Stack chain within the Superchain ecosystem in 2023. Base contributed a portion of its sequencer revenue to the OP’s cash balance under their licensing contract; as the leading Layer 2 (L2) in the ecosystem, Base was also one of the largest contributors overall, and a large part of Optimism’s value proposition was based on this flow of revenue moving into the OP’s cash balance. The transition to Base means the Base network will retain all of that revenue and continue to generate it for itself.
Since that time, there has been a 58% drop in the price of the OP token, and it is trading approximately 97% below its all-time high (ATH) of around USD 4,84. Currently, as you can imagine, technical indicators provide bearish signals, and some analysts believe the break below USD 0.140 would expose a support level at USD 0.10.
Future Prospects
Whales have gathered well over USD 60 million in OP over the last month but are still in a very bearish position, as reflected in the available derivatives data (still holding a $7.9 million short exposure). There will need to be some price movement for optimism to recover structurally, as prices will need to climb above USD 0.20 to displace the current bearish sentiment in the market.