Crypto asset statement: Optimism
Coinsquare Capital Markets Ltd. (“Bitbuy”) is offering crypto contracts to purchase and sell Optimism (OP) in reliance on a prospectus exemption granted by the Canadian Securities Administrators (CSA) in the amended and restated exemptive relief decision dated October 11, 2024. The statutory rights of action for damages and the right of rescission in section 130.1 of the Securities Act (Ontario) and similar legislation in the other CSA jurisdictions do not apply in respect of a misrepresentation in this statement to the extent that a crypto contract is distributed under the above-noted prospectus relief.
No securities regulatory authority in Canada or any other jurisdiction has expressed an opinion about any of the crypto assets (or crypto contracts) that are available through Coinsquare’s platform, including an opinion that the crypto assets are not themselves securities and/or derivatives.
Coinsquare has compiled the information contained in this Crypto Asset Statement to the best of its ability based on publicly available information.
OP is the governance token of Optimism, which is a layer-2 optimistic rollup scaling solution for the Ethereum network. As a scaling solution, Optimism intends to leverage Ethereum’s security while improving its transaction throughput, latency, and costs. Developers can build dApps on Optimism as they would on Ethereum, and those dApps should operate at reduced costs due to Optimism’s rollup technology. The OP token was first issued in May 2022 as a means of introducing the Optimism Collective to the community to accommodate DAO governance through on-chain voting. In January 2025, the Optimism governance community approved a proposal to direct a portion of the network's sequencer revenue toward purchasing OP tokens from the open market, expanding the token's utility beyond governance to include a value accrual mechanism linked to the network's financial performance.
As with all assets, investing in Optimism is not without some general risks. Many of these risks are identified and explained in our Risk Statement. In addition to the general risks, we outline some risks that are specific to Optimism below. While we make an effort to identify every source of risk, we encourage you to do your own research and ensure you are comfortable investing in Optimism.
During the initial launch of the OP token, the Optimism Foundation enlisted the help of Wintermute, a leading crypto market maker, to facilitate the airdrop of 20 million OP tokens. However, the tokens were sent to a Wintermute wallet address that had not yet been synced to layer-2, making them temporarily inaccessible. Within a day, a hacker accessed and removed the entirety of the 20 million tokens. The hacker eventually returned 17 million tokens, kept 2 million as a reward for exposing the vulnerability, and sent 1 million to Vitalik Buterin.
In June 2023, Optimism completed a major network upgrade known as "Bedrock," which involved a complete rewrite of the core components of the Optimism architecture to improve performance and modularity. Prior to the Bedrock release, the new codebase underwent multiple security audits by firms such as Sherlock and Code4rena. While these audits identified various issues that were subsequently addressed or mitigated, the complexity of the code means that potential vulnerabilities may still exist. The Optimism community maintains an active bug bounty program to identify and resolve security issues on an ongoing basis.
The most prominent portion of Optimism’s technology is an Ethereum layer 2 scaling solution that is built on top of the Ethereum Mainnet (layer 1) to provide increased throughput and lower costs for transactions that are processed through the Optimism network, but then ultimately secured by the Ethereum Mainnet. Optimism utilizes optimistic rollup technology to roll multiple transactions up into one transaction on Ethereum layer 1. Layer 2 solutions are a central part of the Ethereum network’s roadmap to scale through a process formerly known as sharding, now implemented through "Proto-Danksharding" (EIP-4844). In March 2024, the Ethereum network successfully executed the "Dencun" upgrade, which introduced "blobs"—a new data storage method that significantly reduces the cost for Layer 2 rollups like Optimism to post data to Ethereum. This upgrade has successfully lowered transaction fees on the Optimism network, reinforcing its integration with the broader Ethereum ecosystem.