“Wow, what a day. OP Drop #1 had a turbulent launch which we finally stabilized after more than five hours of non-stop work,” Optimism stated.
Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution Optimism has been overwhelmed with “all-time high demand” following the launch of its highly anticipated airdrop on Wednesday.
Users racing to collect their tokens were greeted with failed or delayed transactions as the Optimism team raced in the background to add additional capacity to the network.
As previously reported in April, Optimism is airdropping the new OP governance token — over multiple phases — alongside the launch of a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) dubbed “The Optimism Collective.”
Nearly 250,000 addresses are able to receive the airdrop, with the eligibility set for Optimism early adopters and regular Ethereum users, such as DAO voters, multi-sig signers and bridge users.
According to Optimism Status, the mainnet experienced degraded performance for roughly three and a half hours, with the team “provisioning more capacity” to solve the issue. As a result, archive node functionality remains temporarily limited until the network load subsides.
Optimism stated on Twitter that it would take the lessons it learned from the first airdrop and apply them to the second round, while it will also publish an “extensive retrospective next week” detailing what went down.
There are a lot of lessons we learned from this to apply to Drop #2. We’ll be publishing an extensive retrospective next week.
Iteration is core to the Optimism ethos and we always strive to apply today’s lessons to tomorrow’s problems.
— Optimism (✨🔴_🔴✨) (@optimismPBC) June 1, 2022
Twitter users, such as OlimpioCrypto, were the first to announce the airdrop going live earlier on Tuesday to their 35,400 followers, hours ahead of Optimism officially doing so.
As it stands, OP is available for trade on several centralized exchanges such as Coinbase, OKX, Bybit, Gate.io, MEXC Global, along with popular decentralized exchange Uniswap.
(✨🔴_🔴✨) $OP AIRDROP IS LIVE 🪂
2 minutes ago, $OP became claimable in @optimismPBC, and tradable on several exchanges
Thread: all you need to know about the so hyped launch
Claim right now:
🧵👇
— olimpio ⚡️ (@OlimpioCrypto) May 31, 2022
With users racing to snap up free tokens before the official announcement, the Optimism team acknowledged that its network was struggling to support the demand:
And this was certainly not meant to sound negative in any way towards @optimismPBC – quite the opposite, I consider the project as one of the leading once to tackle scaling and them running into scaling issues right now just shows how hard the problem is.
— Martin Köppelmann 🇺🇦 (@koeppelmann) May 31, 2022
According to CoinGecko, OP opened at $1.43 before surging to $2.10; however, the price has since dropped back to roughly $1.92, marking an increase of roughly 34%. So far, trading volume has topped $169 million at the time of writing.
