Kraken’s Ethereum Layer 2 chain, Ink, is outsourcing its entire production infrastructure to Optimism under a multi-year agreement. The deal makes Ink one of the highest-profile adopters of Optimism’s OP Enterprise Fully Managed tier, a service that launched in January 2026 and represents the protocol’s shift from open-source toolkit to professionalized managed service provider.

What the deal actually looks like

Under the OP Enterprise Fully Managed arrangement, Optimism assumes full operational responsibility for Ink’s infrastructure. That includes 24/7 monitoring and a 99.9% uptime guarantee, the kind of service-level agreement you’d expect from a cloud provider, not a crypto protocol.

Ink keeps economic ownership and roadmap control. The Ink Foundation’s stated priorities now shift entirely to ecosystem growth, user acquisition, and developing new financial products.

Ink launched in late 2024 as Kraken’s answer to the L2 race, designed to offer fast and low-cost trading alongside DeFi experiences. The chain is built on Optimism’s OP Stack, making it a natural candidate for this kind of managed service upgrade rather than trying to maintain custom infrastructure internally.

Typical deployment timelines for OP Enterprise setups run between 8 and 12 weeks, according to Optimism. For Ink, which was already running on the OP Stack, the transition should be relatively seamless compared to a greenfield deployment.

The money behind the partnership

Ink is cited as generating an annual recurring revenue potential of approximately $40 million, tied to on-chain activities and applications running on the network.

The financial relationship between Kraken and Optimism goes deeper than just this operational agreement. Kraken previously received a multi-tranche OP token grant of about 25 million OP tokens from the Optimism Foundation to support Ink’s development. That grant effectively subsidized the initial buildout, and the Fully Managed tier now ensures long-term operational support.

Why this matters beyond Ink

When Optimism launched OP Enterprise in January 2026, it formalized something that had been happening informally: chains built on the OP Stack were already leaning on Optimism’s team for operational support. The tiered managed service model just puts a price tag and SLA on it.

Other L2 frameworks, including Arbitrum’s Orbit and zkSync’s ZK Stack, are also courting enterprise customers. But Optimism’s managed service approach is arguably more aggressive, effectively telling potential chain deployers that they don’t need to hire a single infrastructure engineer.