Today we’re excited to welcome Kraken to the Superchain with Ink: a blockchain powered by the OP Stack.

Ink offers secure and seamless access to compelling, streamlined DeFi experiences for an ever-growing community of crypto users.

With 10 million users in 180+ countries, Kraken is one of the world’s largest digital asset exchanges and most respected brands in crypto. Ink’s commitment to the Superchain is a big win for the entire ecosystem.

Rather than compete or create fragmentation with a siloed network, Kraken decided to release Ink on the Superchain: a positive-sum ecosystem powered by Optimism’s open-source tech stack and unified by a global vision to scale Ethereum.

With the Superchain, the success of any single chain benefits all involved, and Ink will be an important contributor and beneficiary of this positive-sum network. Like all teams in the Superchain, Ink will share a percentage of its revenue with the Optimism Collective, participate in Optimism governance, and support core development of the OP Stack.

Kraken came to the Superchain with a vision to bring global users onchain. They saw an opportunity to facilitate new applications across DeFi where simplicity, community, and innovation align.

Launching with 1-second block times, Ink will support use cases like DEXs, lending, perps, yield protocols and more; making it accessible for crypto-native and crypto-curious participants to explore a range of onchain applications.

Ink developers will receive robust support and resources giving them the opportunity to connect with 10+ million users.

“An L2 is only as good as the value it brings to users, and that value is created by a thriving ecosystem of developers,” said Andrew Koller, Founder of Ink. “As part of the Superchain, Ink is laying the groundwork for an interoperable and pluralistic onchain ecosystem that will attract developers and make Ink the ideal platform for the next generation of DeFi applications and protocols.”

Teams like Coinbase, Sony, World, Uniswap, and Kraken have all chosen to build with Optimism’s OP Stack, and make the Superchain their home. The Superchain ecosystem is now composed of 30+ chains built on a common standard codebase that share security, governance, and values.

Today, the Superchain sees over 7 million daily transactions, and nearly half of all Ethereum L2 transactions are happening on the OP Stack. Activity is consistently increasing, and soon we believe a vast majority of L2 transactions will take place on the OP Stack.

Together, the Superchain’s flywheel will bring Ethereum to internet-level scale.

What’s Next for Ink and the Superchain

Ink is part of the Superchain’s path to interoperability and, like other Superchain builders, will support SuperchainERC20 at launch.

SuperchainERC20 is a universal token configuration for the OP Stack; a minimal extension to the ERC20 standard that enables cross chain portability and fungibility. With this standardized security model, all assets are fungible with each other across all interop-compatible OP Chains.

When Superchain interop is fully live, Ink will benefit from the ability to seamlessly interact with other OP Chains, including Base, OP Mainnet, Soneium, Unichain, and World Chain. Interop will reduce fragmentation and provide builders and users alike with the best onchain UX.

In the coming weeks, Ink’s testnet will open with a series of AMAs, live demos, and contests onboarding developers to the network. Developers are also invited to meet the Ink team at DevCon in November.

Ink’s mainnet launch is planned for early 2025.