Ethereum L2: OP’s airdrop launched (Optimism)

The airdrop of OP, Optimism’s governance token, was launched yesterday, but not without problems. 

Optimism: the problems encountered during the airdrop of the OP governance token

Optimism is one of the leading layer 2 scaling solutions for Ethereum, and the OP token will be used to vote in the DAO. 

OP Governance starts today. Follow along for updates on voting cycles, proposal discussion, and delegates.

Learn & discuss: https://t.co/KpQU6BR0jK

Apply for funding: https://t.co/4ymcxyxE2j

— Optimism Governance (@OptimismGov) May 31, 2022

However, the launch of the airdrop had some problems. The launch was described as turbulent and required five hours of non-stop work to get it fixed.

Wow, what a day.

OP Drop #1 had a turbulent launch which we finally stabilized after more than five hours of non-stop work.

We’ll be publishing a full, detailed retrospective on the lessons learned next week. Let’s quickly talk about what happened.

— Optimism (✨?_?✨) (@optimismPBC) June 1, 2022

The problem was the huge demand that couldn’t be handled. 

In fact, as soon as the MerkleDistributor smart contract was deployed, a huge amount of claims started coming in, with no way to stop them.

The Optimism Collective’s comment was: 

“Pandora’s box was OPened (gotta love immutability)!”

Specifically, the problem was the website on which there is the user interface to make the claim. Indeed, given the sudden and enormous traffic, the site went offline momentarily. 

To solve the problem, it was necessary to transfer the site to a better-performing server with more resources, but the process obviously took several hours. 

The block producer (sequencer), on the other hand, continued to operate normally, since it was not dependent on the website.

In the meantime, it was decided to temporarily eliminate the user interface for claims altogether, at which point users themselves began to create their own user interfaces for claims and share links to them. 

The risk was that among these interfaces were also fake and fraudulent ones, so Optimism decided not to promote them. 

After several hours of work, the official site came back online and Drop #1 was officially announced.

Despite the obstacles, the airdrop and the OP token were successful

So far, it appears that free OP tokens have been sent to almost 249,000 eligible wallets. 

The airdrop was announced at the end of April, when Optimism unveiled its new governance structure. It will not be the last, as only 5% of the tokens have been distributed at this stage. 

OP has also already debuted on the crypto markets with an initial price of around $1.4. Within hours of its launch, its price rose to over $1.6, peaking at $2.1. Its market capitalization is still low, under $350 million, but it is already larger than that of, for example, Sushi and CEL (Celsius Network). 

Even when Ethereum moves to Proof-of-Stake, layer 2 solutions such as Optimism could prove very useful, because it is unlikely that the move to PoS alone will drastically reduce transaction fees. Scaling solutions on layer 2, on the other hand, have far greater potential in this respect.