Ethereum’s layer two protocol and smart contract platform Optimism drop its new token OP after much fanfare in the late hours of 31st May. Excited users rushed to grab their tokens only to meet with failed or delayed transactions while the Optimism team scurried to extend the capacity of the network.
Earlier in April, Optimism announced airdropping the new OP governance token of 5% of the total supply of OP tokens or nearly 215 million tokens in multiple phases alongside the launch of a decentralized autonomous organization [DAO] called “The Optimism Collective.”
Roughly 250k addresses are able to receive the airdrop, with the eligibility set for Optimism early adopters and regular Ethereum users.
But soon, the mainnet started experiencing performance issues for nearly three and a half hours. This in turn resulted in users facing delays in claiming their airdrop due to huge traffic on the Optimism public RPC [a gateway for apps to connect with the blockchain].
The airdrop also caused a tremendous increase in the number of transacting addresses on Optimism. According to data from Dune Analytics, the number of transacting addresses skyrocketed 150%, from 7.6k to 19k over the period of 24 hours.
Not just that, the leading cryptocurrency exchange Binance also reported huge delays for deposits on the Optimism network due to increased user demand on the network.
All these prompted Optimism to finally address the issue on Twitter saying that it would take the lessons it learned from the first airdrop and apply them to the second round, before notifying that it will also publish an “extensive retrospective next week” depicting what went down.
The token driving Ethereum’s scaling solution is down by 72%
Optimism is a Layer 2 Optimistic Rollup network designed to enable low-cost and near-instantaneous Ethereum transactions.
OP, the token powering the layer-2 scaling solution has dropped more than 65% from its listing price of $4.57 shortly after its highly-anticipated airdrop.
At the time of writing, OP is down 72.04% in the last 24 hours and is currently exchanging hands at $1.24 after having dropped as low as $0.79 in the early hours after its listing, according to data from CoinMarketCap.
