Optimism Token Plummets 65% Following Hyped Airdrop

Optimism (OP), the token powering the layer-2 Ethereum scaling solution Optimism, shed 65.6% from its listing price of $4.57 shortly after its highly-anticipated airdrop.

OP currently trades at $1.57 after having dropped as low as $0.79 in the early hours after its listing, according to data from CoinMarketCap.

In April 2022, Optimism announced an airdrop of 5% of the total supply of OP tokens or nearly 215 million tokens. A total of 248,699 users were eligible for the airdrops, according to data from Dune Analytics. 

Currently, little under half of the available airdropped tokens have been claimed.

Optimism scaling abilities tested

The immense demand for the airdrop stress-tested the scaling capabilities of the layer-2 solution. 

"OP Drop #1 had a turbulent launch," tweeted the team behind Optimism.

Users experienced delays in claiming their airdrop due to immense traffic on the Optimism public RPC (a gateway for apps to connect with the blockchain).

The airdrop also resulted in a tremendous increase in the number of transacting addresses on Optimism. According to data from Dune Analytics, the number of transacting addresses jumped 150%, from 7.6k to 19k over the past 24 hours.

And as it's mandatory to bridge assets from Ethereum to Optimism to claim the airdrop, activity on relevant bridges also rose. The number of users using the Optimism bridge increased from 141 on May 30 to 3,981 today, according to Dune Analytics.

According to data from Etherscan, 71,439 wallets hold OP tokens at the time of writing. More than 88,300 addresses claimed their airdrop allocation, indicating that roughly 17,000 wallets immediately dumped their OP tokens for profits.

The leading cryptocurrency exchange Binance also reported delays for deposits on the Optimism network due to increased user demand on the network. 

The listing of OP token on Binance has also been delayed by an hour to 8 am UTC today.

The OP token currently trades across different crypto exchanges, including Huobi, Kucoin, Coinbase, Bitrue, and OKX.