Optimism (OP) Price Jumps 20% on ETH Fee Rebate Plan

By Nodora News · 31 October 2026 · Updated 1 November

Optimism (OP) price rose about 20% in 24 hours after the Optimism Foundation proposed ETH sequencer fee rebates and Unichain moved to OP Enterprise.

Optimism's native token, OP, jumped about 20% over the past 24 hours on Saturday, 31 October 2026, making it one of the strongest large-cap movers while most of the crypto market traded flat. On OKX, Optimism (OP) rose from roughly $0.098 to about $0.118, briefly touching $0.122. The move came two days after the Optimism Foundation proposed paying ether (ETH) fee rebates to partners that bring activity to OP Mainnet, and in the same week Uniswap's Unichain network was scheduled to hand its day-to-day operations to Optimism.

Key takeaways

• OP gained about 20% in 24 hours, from around $0.098 to $0.118 on OKX.
• The Optimism Foundation proposed on 29 October to rebate part of OP Mainnet sequencer fees to select partners, paid in ETH rather than OP.
• Unichain's mainnet migration to Optimism's OP Enterprise service was scheduled for 29 October.
• Bitcoin and ether were roughly flat to slightly higher over the same period, so the rally was specific to OP.
• The rebate plan is still a proposal and needs governance approval.

Why Is Optimism (OP) Price Up Today?

Market trackers including Lookonchain and BlockTempo linked the jump to two pieces of Optimism news that landed late in the week.

The first is a governance proposal posted on the Optimism forum on 29 October. The Optimism Foundation asked the community for permission to give certain business partners a rebate on the sequencer fees their own activity creates on OP Mainnet. A sequencer is the service that orders and processes transactions on a layer-2 network (a chain that runs on top of Ethereum), and it collects fees for that work.

The second is Unichain. Uniswap Labs said earlier this month that its Unichain network would move to OP Enterprise, Optimism's managed service for running chains, with the testnet switching on 13 October and mainnet on 29 October. Under that setup, Optimism runs Unichain's sequencers, RPC endpoints (the gateways apps use to talk to the chain), monitoring and incident response. Chain ID, contracts, balances and apps stay the same.

Neither event is a guarantee of more revenue, but both point in the same direction: more activity and fees flowing through the network of chains Optimism calls the Superchain.

How the Sequencer Fee Rebate Plan Works

The proposal is designed so the rebates cost the network nothing unless a partner brings in new business. Its main rules:

• Rebates apply only to fees from activity a specific partner brings to OP Mainnet, never to general network traffic.
• A rebate can never be larger than the fees that partner generated.
• Partners must hit agreed activity milestones before any rebate starts, and every agreement has a fixed term.
• Rebates are paid in ETH from fee revenue, not in OP, so no new OP enters circulation.
• The Foundation will not name partners or publish deal terms, but it will report total rebates as a share of fee revenue in its annual budget report.

That last point on paying in ETH matters to token holders. Token incentive programs often create steady selling pressure as recipients dump rewards. By using fee revenue instead, the Foundation is trying to grow usage without adding OP supply.

The plan also ties into Optimism's existing buyback experiment, which directs up to 50% of net Superchain revenue to buying OP on the market. Buybacks would be calculated on revenue after rebates, and TokenPost reports the program has already bought more than 9.4 million OP. The Foundation's argument is simple: if a partner's activity creates fees that would not otherwise exist, the revenue left for buybacks is still larger than without that partner.

Optimism (OP) Price: The Numbers

Here is how the market looked on OKX at around 1:55 pm Melbourne time (02:55 UTC) on 31 October:

• OP: about $0.118, up roughly 20% in 24 hours
• 24-hour range: $0.097 to $0.122
• 24-hour OP spot volume on OKX: about 44 million OP, or roughly $4.9 million
• ETH: about $2,245, up about 1.6%
• BTC: about $77,410, roughly flat

The gain stands out because the wider market is still nervous after the record $6.3 billion Binance hack earlier this week. BlockTempo notes OP bounced about 25% from a Friday low near $0.097, yet it remains below the $0.15-plus level it traded at after the Unichain testnet migration in mid-October, and roughly 97% under its March 2024 all-time high of about $4.84.

You can follow OP and other major coins on Nodora Charts.

What This Means for Optimism Holders

For OP holders, the week's news is more about the business model than about any single upgrade. Optimism is trying to show that the Superchain can earn real fee revenue, and that some of that revenue can flow back to the token through buybacks.

There are caveats. The rebate plan has not been approved yet. The Foundation will not disclose who gets rebates or on what terms, so outsiders will only see aggregate numbers once a year. And sharp single-day moves in smaller tokens can fade quickly, especially in a market still digesting the Binance hack.

What to Watch Next

• The governance vote: whether Optimism token holders approve the sequencer fee rebate proposal.
• Unichain after the switch: confirmation that the mainnet cutover went smoothly and how much fee activity moves through Optimism-run infrastructure.
• Native interop: Optimism and Uniswap Labs have said bridge-free ETH transfers between Unichain and OP Mainnet would come later, subject to separate upgrades and governance approval. No date has been set.
• Buyback figures: future updates on how much OP the buyback program has bought.

This article is for information only and is not financial advice.

#Optimism #OP #Layer 2 #Unichain #Ethereum

This article is general information, not financial advice.