“Wow, what a day. OP Drop #1 got off to a rocky start, but we’ve finally stabilized it after over five hours of continuous play,” Optimism explained.
Ethereum Layer-2 Scaling Solution Optimism was overcome by “all-time high demand” following the launch of a highly anticipated airdrop on Wednesday.
Users seeking to claim their tokens experienced failed or delayed transactions while the Optimism team raced in the background to add more bandwidth to the network.
As reported back in April, Optimism is issuing a new OP Governance Token — in stages — along with the launch of a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) dubbed the Optimism Collective.
Approximately 250,000 addresses can receive the airdrop, with eligibility set for early adopters of Optimism and regular Ethereum users such as DAO voters, multi-signature subscribers, and bridge users.
According to Optimism Status, mainnet performance was down for about three and a half hours, and the team “deployed additional capacity” to address the issue. This temporarily limits the functionality of the archive node until the network load decreases.
Optimism explained on Twitter that it will take the lessons learned from the first airdrop and apply them to the second round, as well as releasing a “full retrospective next week” detailing what happened.
“Wow, what a day. OP Drop #1 got off to a rocky start, but we finally stabilized it after over five hours of continuous play.”
Twitter users like OlimpioCrypto were the first to announce the giveaway to their 35,400 followers earlier Tuesday, hours before Optimism officially did so.
OP is currently available for trading on several centralized exchanges such as Coinbase, OKX, Bybit, Gate.io, MEXC Global, as well as the popular decentralized exchange Uniswap.
As users rush to get free tokens ahead of the official announcement, the Optimism team acknowledged that their network is struggling to keep up with demand:
“Sup detectives, you guessed it, OP Drop #1 starts today. We haven’t officially announced it yet, but we’re already seeing unprecedented demand. don’t wait for #OPSummer.”
“We are working to provide many more features ahead of our official announcement, and in the meantime, the public RPC may be slow to respond,” he added.
RPC (Remote Procedure Call) allows various applications such as MetaMask or Uniswap to interact with Optimism and Ethereum and appears to be the key issue slowing down OP’s transactions.
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Commenting on the fall, Martin Keppelmann, co-founder of the Gnosis blockchain compatible with the Ethereum virtual machine, stated that he believes Optimism is one of the “leading” projects solving Ethereum’s scaling problems, but this fall highlighted that “scaling is difficult.” .
According to CoinGecko, OP opened at $1.43 before rising to $2.10; However, the price has since fallen to around $1.92, an increase of around 34%. At the time of writing, trading volume has exceeded $169 million.
