Crypto exchanges are no longer just trading venues. They are becoming vertically integrated onchain infrastructure operators — and the economics are shifting accordingly.
In the press release shared with The Crypto Times, OP Labs announced that exchange-owned chains built on the OP Stack generated more than $495 million in application revenue in H2 2025. The figure captures the full on-chain economics driven by the world’s largest exchanges: sequencer fees from transactions, revenue generated through applications embedded directly into their platforms, and assets that remained onchain.
The ratio is striking. Across these exchange-owned chains, applications generated $13.60 in revenue for every $1 in sequencer fees. That inverts the historical model, where exchanges outsourced settlement to third-party networks that captured the downstream value from transaction fees, application activity, and broader onchain monetization.
“The H2 numbers invert the old system. Exchanges monetized trading and external networks captured everything downstream. That’s over,” said Kyle Jenke, Chief Business Officer at the Optimism Foundation. “Exchanges now own the settlement, distribution, and application layers their users transact on.”
Chain-by-Chain Breakdown
The application growth across individual exchange chains tells the story of how quickly this shift is accelerating.
Coinbase’s Base: Morpho’s TVL on Base grew from $48 million at the start of 2025 to over $960 million by year-end — a roughly 20x increase. The growth was driven primarily by lending products surfacing directly inside the Coinbase app rather than through wallet-based acquisition. Base is now Morpho’s second-largest chain globally, accounting for 32% of Morpho’s app fees in H2 2025 — 13x more than Arbitrum and 60x more than OP Mainnet.
Kraken’s Ink: The chain added more than 1 million unique addresses since December 2024. Fewer than 0.6% had any prior onchain history with Kraken. The remaining 99.4% were net-new onchain wallets — evidence that exchange chains are expanding the onchain user base rather than simply rerouting existing customers. Tydro, an Aave V3 white-label lending protocol that launched on Ink in October 2025, reached $100 million in TVL in its first 24 hours and crossed $500 million in 90 days. Comparable Aave deployments on neutral L2s took between 142 and 721 days to hit the same milestones.
The Broader Ecosystem
Beyond exchange chains, the OP Stack ecosystem hit several all-time highs in H2 2025. Across more than 50 live chains, OP Stack networks secured $16.33 billion in total value, held $6.8 billion in DeFi TVL, and processed 3.6 billion transactions — all record figures.
The ecosystem now spans exchanges, consumer applications, financial infrastructure, and developer platforms. Chains running on the OP Stack include Base, Ink, Unichain (Uniswap Labs), Soneium (Sony), World Chain, Celo, and newer institutional entrants.
Regulated Institutions Are Joining
The OP Stack is also becoming a deployment target for regulated institutional infrastructure.
Bitpanda’s Vision Chain, the first chain deployed under OP Labs’ Fully Managed OP Enterprise tier, is built for MiCA- and MiFID II-aligned institutional finance in Europe. Florian Klein, Bitpanda’s Commercial Lead for Web3, said: “Our ambition with Vision Chain is to become the foundation for Europe’s DeFi economy: built for the European regulatory landscape, designed for regulated financial institutions, and open to Web3 builders.”
Japan’s Mitsui & Co. Digital Commodities launched Zipangcoin, a regulated precious-metals-backed token, on OP Mainnet. South Korea’s Upbit operator launched GIWA Chain on the OP Stack. Jungin Lee, Head of Business for GIWA Chain, said the OP Stack allowed them to “leverage Ethereum’s robust security while achieving the scalability needed for a global exchange.”
Together, these deployments represent the earliest examples of regulated institutional infrastructure running on Optimism rails — a signal that the OP Stack’s adoption is extending beyond DeFi-native use cases into traditional financial services.
Why It Matters
The $495 million figure crystallizes a structural shift that has been building throughout 2025 and into 2026. Historically, exchanges were distribution layers that sat on top of third-party blockchain infrastructure. Settlement, application fees, and onchain monetization all flowed to the networks those exchanges transacted on.
By owning their own chains, exchanges capture the full stack: the trading layer, the settlement layer, the application layer, and the assets that stay onchain. The OP Stack’s shared standard — MIT-licensed, open-source, with native interoperability for assets, identity, and messaging between chains — means exchanges can own their infrastructure without fragmenting from each other.
“Exchanges are becoming the front door to onchain finance,” said Jinglan Wang, CEO of OP Labs. “Users may not think about which protocol, lending market, or payments rail they’re touching, but they will increasingly access these products through the exchanges they already use.”
The competitive implication is clear: exchanges that own their chains keep the economics. Those that don’t are paying rent.
Also read: Upbit Teams Up With Optimism for New L2 Network GIWA Chain
