Espresso Foundation launches the ESP token and transitions the network to a permissionless proof-of-stake mechanism

2026-02-12 15:15:27

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Espresso Foundation announced that today it officially launched the ESP token and transformed the Espresso Network into a permissionless proof-of-stake network, allowing the public to participate in securing the network.

Since the mainnet launch in November 2024, the network has confirmed over 65 million blocks across nine integrated chains, including ApeChain, RARI Chain, Rufus, and Molten Network. Projects planned for integration in 2026 include Celo (the first OP Stack chain integrated), Morph, Katana, Gate Layer, and LitVM (using a dual settlement mode of Ethereum and Litecoin).

Espresso aims to address the fragmentation problem of rollups. While Ethereum transactions typically take over 12 minutes for final confirmation, the Espresso Network currently has an average block confirmation time of 6 seconds and plans to achieve sub-second latency by 2026. At the application layer, Rarible has utilized this solution to enable cross-chain NFT minting, allowing users to mint NFTs on one chain using funds from another chain without manual cross-chain bridging.

With the launch of the ESP token, the project is shifting from centralized development to decentralized infrastructure. ESP is a utility token used for network staking and participation. Protocol upgrades will be decided through community consensus rather than token-based governance. The total supply of ESP is 3.59 billion tokens, with 10% allocated to community airdrops to reward early supporters; this portion of tokens was fully unlocked today.

ESP-0,73%

RARI9,85%

CELO0,02%

ETH-1,17%

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