Optimism’s Less Than Optimistic Airdrop

Optimism is a rollup-based layer 2 network on Ethereum. For months, the crypto community has anticipated an airdrop for users of the network, which finally dropped today. Unfortunately, the airdrop didn’t live up to the hype.

• The ticker for the airdropped token is OP, and it will serve as the governance token fueling the DAO, the Optimism Collective.
• 231,000 addresses were eligible to claim 214 million OP tokens or 5% of the total 4.29 billion supply.
• The average distribution was 860 tokens per address but many in the community were upset that some users were able to claim the airdrop ahead of the official announcement.
• According to Optimism’s official Twitter account, the all-time high demand on the chain caused RPC delays. In other words, the Optimism communication protocols could not handle the heavy load of users trying to interact with the chain.
• Apps like Uniswap and Metamask defaulting on top of Optimism were unable to communicate execution requests, prohibiting transactions from occurring.

Optimism aims to achieve faster and cheaper transactions than on the Ethereum chain but today their communication protocols could not live up to that. This isn’t the first network to have a congested airdrop but it is garnering attention because its primary use is to be the scaling solution for Ethereum but when it came time to scale, users were locked out.