Optimism’s OP mainnet has begun a four-week experiment allowing users to increase transaction priority by staking at least 100,000 OP, marking the first time its sequencer has deviated from the order of pure gas fees.
Summary
- OP mainnet is testing staking-based trading orders alongside its existing priority gas auction.
- Users must stake a minimum of 100,000 OP on a PolicyEngine contract to participate.
- The four-week pilot is run in two phases, moving from FIFO to a stake-weighted gas multiplier.
According to an official announcement from Optimism, OP mainnet has “tweaked its transaction ranking rules for the first time,” adding an experimental stake-based priority track to the long-standing “highest priority gas fee first” mechanism that currently governs the network’s sequencer. OP users can now voluntarily participate in a four-week pilot, which will run until June 23, by staking no less than 100,000 OP in the new PolicyEngine Stake contract.
The goal, as outlined in Optimism’s governance discussions, is to test whether staking-based orders can dampen toxic arbitrage traffic, create new OP demand, and give sophisticated users a more predictable way to protect block space during volatile periods. For now, the experiment is running parallel to the existing Priority Gas Auction (PGA), and the order of transactions for non-participants remains unchanged, preserving the standard fee-based competition for block inclusion.
Two-Phase Design: Participation-Weighted Gas FIFO
The pilot is structured into two distinct phases, each exploring a different piece of the ordering puzzle. In phase one, which covers the first week, all participating addresses that reach the 100,000 OP threshold are treated equally under a strict first-in-first-out (FIFO) rule, meaning that “exceeding the minimum staking amount will not affect priority,” according to Optimism’s release description.
From weeks two to four, the mechanism changes to a “priority gas multiplier” that is explicitly “weighted by duration of participation,” so that the longer an address has locked its PO into the PolicyEngine contract, the higher its effective gas priority weighting will be when competing for orders. In practice, this gives long-term stakeholders an advantage in ensuring the inclusion of latency-sensitive flows such as arbitrage, liquidations or high-frequency trading strategies, a design that resembles the way some exchanges reward quiescent liquidity over opportunistic stakeholders.
Most importantly, the rest of the network stays on the familiar rails. Users who do not opt-in to the experiment will continue to receive orders solely through the PGA system that OP mainnet has used “for many years,” with no changes to the way standard wallet transactions compete solely on gas price. That parallel path helps isolate the behavioral impact of the new staking queue while reducing the risk that a flawed design could disrupt daily activity on one of Ethereum’s most used Layer 2s.
Broader L2 and betting context
The Optimism pilot lands at a time when Ethereum’s Layer 2s are aggressively experimenting with new ways of pricing and allocating block space, from shared sequencer proposals to intent-based architectures and order flow auctions. Similar to how liquid betting protocols like Lido Finance have used incentives to attract staked assets to networks like Optimism and Arbitrum, OP’s PolicyEngine design explicitly attempts to turn governance tokens into a lever for transaction priority rather than just voting power or emission farming.
The OP ecosystem has also positioned itself as a central location for both DeFi and speculative flows, competing with other layer 2 environments and sidechains that offer lower fees or specialized features. That competition has helped drive experimentation across the board, from token economics to sequencer design, and echoes earlier phases of infrastructure innovation in which protocols from Bitcoin to Ethereum rethought everything from fee markets to MEV capture.
For now, the opt-in priority experiment is explicitly time-limited. Optimism has said that after the four-week window, the OP mainnet will return to its standard PGA-only order, while governance and major contributors digest the on-chain data and decide whether stake-weighted orders should return on a more permanent basis. If the numbers show significantly better outcomes for users without unacceptable centralization or fair trade-offs, the pilot could become a model for how other rollups treat block space as a policy instrument, not just a commodity to be auctioned.
Within the broader crypto market, OP trades alongside other major assets such as bitcoin and etherealand investors are increasingly weighing not only the token economy but also the aggressiveness with which each ecosystem drives scalability and user experience. As more networks, from Ethereum staking leaders like Lido to emerging Layer 2 experiments highlighted in recent crypto.news coveragetry to differentiate itself on design, Optimism’s push for priority staking will be closely watched by anyone who believes the next phase of the competition will be fought in the sequencer, not just the application layer.
