Optimism wallet

What is Optimism (OP)?

OP is the governance token of the Optimism Collective, and its home is OP Mainnet, an Ethereum Layer 2 that runs as an optimistic rollup: transactions execute on the L2 and their data is posted back to Ethereum for settlement. Holding OP is a vote, not a fee coin. Gas on OP Mainnet is paid in ETH, so a wallet with OP but no ETH on the Optimism network cannot send anything; keep a small ETH balance on the same network next to the token.

Two things a holder should keep straight. First, the token and the network share a name: "Optimism" can mean OP Mainnet, the wider Superchain of chains built on the OP Stack, or the OP token itself. OP is an ERC-20 contract on OP Mainnet and is not the native coin of any of those chains. Second, OP can be bridged to Ethereum mainnet, and a withdrawal from the L2 back to L1 through the standard bridge waits out the rollup's challenge period, which is measured in days rather than minutes.

What the token does: OP holders form the Token House, one of the two houses of Optimism governance, voting on protocol upgrades and on how the Collective allocates its funds. Votes can be cast directly or delegated, and delegation does not move the tokens out of the holder's address; it only assigns voting weight. OP itself does not rebase, does not change balance on its own, and needs no separate token account.

That makes OP a long-hold asset: the key that controls it may be used once in months, for a delegation or a vote, and the rest of the time it simply has to stay intact. Tangem generates that key inside the card's secure element and never exports it, and the backup is a second card carrying the same key rather than a seed phrase written down somewhere. For a token whose main use is being held and occasionally signed with, that is the arrangement OP naturally belongs in.

Supported networks in Tangem (1): Optimism.