Optimism airdrop overwhelmed by all-time high demand: "Scaling is hard"

Ethereum layer 2 scaling solution Optimism has been inundated with “unprecedented high demand” after launching a highly anticipated airdrop on Wednesday.

While the Optimism team raced behind the scenes to add additional capacity to the network, users racing to collect tokens experienced failed transactions or delays.

As previously reported in April, Optimism is airdropping new OP governance tokens in multiple stages, alongside the launch of a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) called “The Optimism Collective.”

Nearly 250,000 addresses were able to receive the airdrop, with eligibility set for Optimism early adopters and regular Ethereum users such as DAO voters, multi-signatures, and bridge users.

According to Optimism Status, the mainnet experienced performance degradation for about three and a half hours, and the team "provided more capacity" to address the issue. Therefore, archive node functionality is temporarily limited until the network load subsides.

Optimism tweeted that it will take the lessons learned from the first airdrop and apply them to the second round, while they will also “publish a detailed retrospective report next week” detailing what happened.

"Wow, what a great day. The launch of OP Drop #1 was bumpy, and after over five hours of non-stop work, we finally stabilized."

Twitter users such as OlimpioCrypto were the first to announce the airdrop to their 35,400 followers on Tuesday, hours before Optimism officially announced the news.

As it stands, OP is available for trading on multiple centralized exchanges such as Coinbase, OKX, Bybit, Gate.io, MEXC Global, and the popular decentralized exchange Uniswap.

As users raced to snap up tokens ahead of the official announcement, the Optimism team acknowledged that its network was struggling to support demand:

"Detectives - as you may have guessed, OP Drop #1 is out today. We haven't officially announced it yet, but we've experienced unprecedented high demand. We know everyone's going to be excited, but gosh - y'all can't wait It's #OPSummer."

It added: "We are working on making more capacity available in large quantities before the official announcement - in the meantime public RPCs may be slow to respond."

RPC (remote procedure call) enables various applications (such as MetaMask or Uniswap) to interact with Optimism and Ethereum, and seems to be the key issue slowing down OP transactions.

Commenting on the airdrop, Martin Köppelmann, co-founder of Gnosis, an Ethereum Virtual Machine-compatible blockchain, said he believes Optimism is one of the "leading" projects to solve Ethereum's scaling problems, but the airdrop highlights "scaling hard" this.

According to CoinGecko, the OP opened at $1.43 before surging to $2.10; however, the price has since fallen back to around $1.92, an increase of around 34%. So far, at the time of writing, the transaction volume has exceeded $169 million.