Optimism launched its highly anticipated airdrop, though not without problems.
Optimism, an Ethereum layer-two scaling solution, finally launched its airdrop, which had been highly anticipated in the entire crypto space.
However, things did not go as smoothly as Optimism (or airdrop recipients) may have hoped. Upon launch, many users found to be not eligible despite having been notified of their eligibility previously. Others were struggling with failed transactions as the network could not keep up with the high demand.
The airdrop of the OP token will happen over several stages as the network launches its DAO called "The Optimism Collective." even after removing 17,000 addresses to weed out bots, more than 230,000 addresses were eligible for the airdrop. Qualifying requirements were for example, voting in a DAO, bridging, signing multi-sigs, and several other requirements.
The Optimism mainnet was bogged down by the increased load for a few hours, to which the network responded on its Twitter account:
The network acknowledged that the drop had not gone as well as it hoped it would and promised to do better next time:
Although blockchain builders on Twitter lauded Optimism for its efforts and gave the network credit considering the difficulty of Ethereum scaling, retail users were not as patient.
Several users took to Twitter and let Optimism know about their dissatisfaction in no unclear terms.
The OP token, already available for trading on several exchanges like Binance, KuCoin, and Gate.io, felt the wrath of retail. From its launch price of $4.57, the token price quickly plummeted below $2 and is currently trading at $1.28.