A couple weeks ago, we covered some recent developments of Optimism following their announcement of their first airdrop and new governance structure. The OP token airdrop was made claimable on 1st June 2022.
OP price and volume chart. Source: CoinGecko
Upon launch, the OP token rose to an ATH of $2.10 but shortly after plunged ~49% to a low of $1.07. Price action has since consolidated somewhat, and the token currently trades at $1.22 at time of writing.
The airdrop did not go smoothly. Long story short, the Optimism team deployed the token contract and claims UI, which some users managed to find prior to their official announcement. This overwhelmed their public RPC endpoint, and the team took down their claims UI to decrease load while addressing the issue. Some users, however, constructed their own custom-built claims UIs which circumvented this measure. After several hours of work to stabilize the RPC, the team finally announced the drop on Twitter. The combination of these issues roused some frustration within the community who had trouble interacting with claims UI / chain, as well as felt it was unfair that some users were able to claim tokens earlier than others.
