Kraken incubated Ink upgrades to Optimism’s fully managed infrastructure

Ink, the Ethereum Layer 2 network incubated by Kraken, is moving its production infrastructure to Optimism’s OP Enterprise Fully Managed service under a multi year agreement.

Optimism will take responsibility for operating Ink’s core network infrastructure, while the Ink Foundation focuses on expanding its ecosystem and developing new financial products.

The arrangement gives Optimism control over the operational systems behind the network, including its sequencer, batcher, proposer and supporting infrastructure.

Ink will retain control over its chain, product strategy and the applications built on top of the network.

The move represents one of the first cases of a major existing Layer-2 network transferring its infrastructure operations to a fully managed provider.

Ink launched its mainnet in December 2024 using the OP Stack. The network processed more than 1 million transactions during its first 24 hours.

Applications operating on Ink now generate close to $40 million in annual revenue, according to the projects.

Ink will also become a design partner for OP Enterprise and help shape infrastructure features aimed at exchanges and financial institutions.

The planned roadmap includes programmable block building, withdrawals to Ethereum within one day and compliance tools built directly into the sequencer layer.

Optimism and Ink are also targeting guaranteed throughput of 400 megagas per second and block times as low as 100 milliseconds by the end of 2026.

Ink Foundation Head of Strategy Zach Le said operating a blockchain in production requires specialized technical expertise and that Optimism was selected because it created the stack underlying Ink.

The agreement allows Ink’s team to direct more resources toward ecosystem development while Optimism handles reliability, security, upgrades and network performance.

Ink follows Bitpanda’s Vision Chain, which became the first blockchain deployed through OP Enterprise Fully Managed earlier this year.

The addition of Ink expands Optimism’s managed infrastructure service to an established exchange linked network operating in the United States.