OP Labs

Jinglan Wang was introduced to Ethereum by Vitalik Buterin, who connected her with researcher Karl Floersch at the Ethereum Foundation. Working with Floersch, she helped create the Plasma Group, a non-profit advancing Ethereum scaling research, which later pivoted toward optimistic rollups after seeing demand for a lower-fee Layer 2. That work became Optimism, which she co-founded in 2019. She serves as Executive Director of the Optimism Foundation, which stewards the protocol's governance and its retroactive public-goods funding.

Karl Floersch was a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, where he worked on Ethereum's proof-of-stake and scaling research and mentored Jinglan Wang. Together they founded the Plasma Group research collective, which pivoted from Plasma to optimistic rollups and became Optimism. He co-founded Optimism in 2019 and serves as CEO of OP Labs, the company that builds the open-source OP Stack and the Superchain of interoperable Layer 2 chains that includes Coinbase's Base.

Ben Jones co-founded Optimism in 2019 after working with Jinglan Wang and Karl Floersch on Ethereum scaling research at the Plasma Group. He served as Chief Scientist at OP Labs, contributing to the research and protocol design behind Optimism's optimistic-rollup architecture, and later became a director at the Optimism Foundation. His work centers on the technical and governance design of the OP Stack and the broader Superchain.

Kevin Ho is a co-founder of Optimism, joining Jinglan Wang, Karl Floersch, and Ben Jones in 2019 to turn the Plasma Group's optimistic-rollup research into a working Ethereum Layer 2. He was part of the founding team that built Optimism into a leading scaling network and the OP Stack framework now used across the Superchain.