Ethereum Layer 2 Network Optimism Is Dropping a Token

The Optimism team has announced that the token would be given through a series of airdrops, with new users still being able to participate.

Optimism is one of a number of Layer 2 solutions aimed at assisting Ethereum in achieving scalability.

The new OP token from Optimism will be issued to Optimism users over the course of "one whole season of airdrops." The team unveiled its token as part of a bigger push toward the Optimism Collective, a decentralized governing framework.

Another airdrop is coming to Ethereum power users—in fact, a series of them. One of Ethereum's major Layer 2 scaling projects, Optimism, has announced the launch of a governance token with the ticker OP. The company also published a list of airdrop eligibility criteria, which range from simple things like being an Optimism user to more difficult things like being a DAO voter or multisig signer.

The token airdrop will be the first in a series of airdrops to be released in the coming months. While the team did not provide an exact date for the first airdrop, it took care to warn users that it is not live yet, and any attempt to convince users otherwise is a scam.

The token decrease is part of a bigger shift toward decentralized governance. The Optimism Collective, as it will be named after today's announcement, will have a bicameral "house" system with a Token House and a Citizens' House dividing governance powers. Optimism will add users to the Citizens' House later by issuing "soulbound" NFTs that cannot be purchased or sold, and the Token House will be made up of OP beneficiaries during the first airdrop. The bicameral system is designed to counteract the potential plutocratic inclinations of token-based governance.

Optimism uses Optimistic Rollups, a type of cryptographic method, to help Ethereum scale. It can process transactions faster and at a lesser cost than Ethereum mainnet while using the network's security by running its own network on top of the base chain.

The Ethereum mainnet is connected to Optimism's Layer 2 network via a bridge. The network has welcomed significant DeFi initiatives like Synthetix and Uniswap since its introduction in 2021. Optimism will use a decentralized governance approach similar to many other DeFi initiatives on Ethereum when issuing a token.

The token announcement had been anticipated for several days, thanks mainly to an Apr. 19 Mirror post in which Optimism detailed a plan to start a new chapter “driven by community ownership and governance.”

The project has witnessed tremendous growth in recent months as more attention has been paid to Ethereum's Layer 2 scaling solutions. According to L2Beat data, the network currently has $662 million in total value locked, up 15% in the previous week when the token speculations began to circulate. Notably, despite the current surge of publicity surrounding Optimism, it still trails its greatest competitor, Arbitrum, another Optimistic Rollup Layer 2 solution with $3.57 billion in total value locked—more than half of the Ethereum Layer 2 market.

While Optimism and Arbitrum are now Ethereum's two most powerful scaling weapons, this is expected to change if ZK-Rollups such as StarkWare's StarkNet acquire traction. MakerDAO, an early Ethereum DeFi project, announced plans to launch on StarkNet this Thursday, starting with a bridge launch, as part of its commitment to helping the Ethereum ecosystem scale (2022 is also a big year for the Ethereum protocol and its scaling roadmap, with the highly anticipated "Merge" to Proof-of-Stake set to launch).

It's not commonplace in the DeFi sector for projects to release a token after a competitor does so in order to promote usage and help bootstrap growth. In any case, the race to build out Layer 2 will certainly become a major storyline in Ethereumland in the coming months, alongside the Merge.