Optimism, the Ethereum scaling protocol, has distributed 19.4 million OP tokens, valued at $26.7 million, to nearly 32,000 unique wallet addresses as part of an airdrop initiative. These tokens were allocated to users who engaged in on-chain governance activities and delegated their OP tokens to community votes between January and July 2023, meeting Optimism’s eligibility criteria.
The airdrop is intended to reward “positive sum governance participation” and does not require any user action to claim the tokens, making it a hassle-free process.
Optimism, which operates in the competitive Layer-2 market and launched its mainnet in December 2021, previously conducted an airdrop in June 2022, distributing 200 million OP tokens to early adopters. Another airdrop, known as “Airdrop #2,” released an additional 11.7 million OP tokens to users in February 2023. In total, Optimism has committed 19% of its initial token supply to community rewards and airdrops.
As of now, Optimism is ranked sixth in total value locked (TVL) within the decentralized finance (DeFi) sector, with approximately $650 million locked in its network, according to DeFiLlama. It follows Ethereum, Tron, Binance Smart Chain (BSC), Arbitrum, and Polygon in terms of TVL.
In a significant milestone, Optimism surpassed fellow Layer-2 blockchain Arbitrum in daily transaction volume in July 2023. Additionally, the protocol has introduced the OP Stack developer kit, which facilitates the creation of Layer-2 blockchains. Notably, networks like Base, incubated by Coinbase, and Binance’s opBNB chain have utilized OP Stack for their development.
