While the entire community has been recovering from the Terra crash, some ‘Optimism’ was induced into the crypto-verse. Ethereum’s layer 2 scaling network, Optimism finally rolled out its OP governance token on Ethereum. Following the launch, an array of cryptocurrency exchanges came forward in support of this token. Just like every other network in the crypto industry, these tokens were distributed through an airdrop. However, things didn’t go as planned.
Optimism first announced the launch of OP along with the airdrop back in April. To the network’s surprise, it managed to garner an overwhelming response as the demand soared to an all-time high. While this is certainly a good thing, some users began experiencing a delay or failure in transactions.
Surprisingly, this increased demand was achieved even before Optimism made an official announcement.
“Sup sleuths—as you might have guessed, OP Drop #1 launches today. We have NOT officially announced yet, but we’re already experiencing an all-time high demand. We knew everyone would be excited, but holy cow—y’all just couldn’t wait for #OPSummer.”
However, the mainnet’s performance deteriorated for roughly three and a half hours since the team was providing extra capacity to mend the issue. Therefore, up until the network strain is reduced, archive node operation is expected to be temporarily decreased.
Several took to Twitter and pointed out how scalability wasn’t as easy as it sounded. While Optimism made its debut as a scaling solution, an array of them were pointing out the irony.
Optimistic for the next OP airdrop
The airdrop is scheduled to occur over numerous phases. While the first one did not transpire as expected, the Optimism team suggested that it had learned its lessons. In a recent Twitter thread, the network revealed that it was able to stabilize the public RPC only after several hours of work. The downfall of the RPC did not allow users to buy or sell OP governance tokens. Only after this, the network officially announced the airdrop.
During press time, OP was trading for $1.75 with a 22.5 percent surge over the last 24-hours. CoinGecko ranked OP as the 73rd largest crypto as its market cap was at $829,875,173.