According to news shared by OP Labs leadership, OP Labs, a major development company supporting the Optimism ecosystem, has laid off 20 employees as part of an internal reorganization aimed at strengthening the organization’s strategic focus.
OP Labs CEO Wang Jing said in a post on X that the decision was made after internal discussions with affected employees and was communicated to employees before being publicly disclosed. The company said the layoffs were driven by the need to “narrow our focus” rather than financial constraints.
“This has nothing to do with finances,” she said in a Slack message shared with the post. “OP Labs is well capitalized and has many years of R&D experience.”
Instead, she said the move was aimed at simplifying decision-making and “doing fewer things…exceptionally well.”
OP token has fallen by approximately 3% in the past 24 hours.
OP Labs plays a central role in the development of Optimism, an Ethereum layer 2 scaling network designed to make transactions faster and cheaper by handling activity outside of the Ethereum main chain. The broader Optimism ecosystem now includes several well-known chains built on its technology stack, including Coinbase’s Base, Uniswap’s Unichain, and Sony’s Soneium.
CoinDesk reached out to OP Labs for comment and clarification on the percentage of employees who were laid off.
Read more: Optimism’s OP token drops after Base moves away from network’s ‘OP stack’ amid major technology shift
