Airdrop Battles

Last summer Layer 2 solutions made a big splash in crypto headlines and then settled into the background for development work. Until now. While others thrashed around in the panic of an impending bear season, these products started growing their userbase and fine-tuning their governance:

• Ethereum scaling solutions like Optimism and Arbitrum have been offering dApp services on their chains for many months. Both are optimistic rollups that have a withdrawal period of several days to allow for any fraud claims.
• When they launched, neither had their own cryptocurrency token, but that’s all about to change. Optimism announced a token yesterday ($OP) as part of a new governance structure called the Optimism Collective.
• The counterpart to the fungible token will be a series of non-transferable NFTs conferred to ‘citizens’, who will govern funding and protocol development.
• There will be several airdrops starting in Q2, and 250k addresses are currently eligible. Rewards are stackable depending on how many criteria users have met and there is a bonus for hitting four or more.
• Rumours are already flying that Arbitrum might fast-track their own airdrop, with some suggesting they already took a snapshot to prevent a surge of late users who missed out on Optimism.
• Arbitrum has been hit by some availability problems and rugs recently, that led one Twitter user to joke about what such an airdrop would look like.

To learn more about rollups check out our introduction here, and for more details on the future governance of Optimism you can visit their community documentation.