Optimism Token Crashes 65% After Airdrop Hype

The Optimism Token crashes 65% after the much-hyped Airdrop due to heavy network congestion as we can see more today in our latest cryptocurrency news today.

Amid the extreme network congestion after the airdrop, the native token of Optimism crashed by 60%. Optimism Token that powers the Ethereum scaling solution shed 65.6% from the listing price of $4.57 after the airdrop. OP now trades at $1.57 after dropping as low as $0.79 during the early hours of the listing as per the data from CoinGecko. In April 2022, Optimism announced an airdrop of 5% of the total supply of the tokens, or nearly 215 million tokens, and a total of 248,699 users were eligible for the airdrops as per the data from Dune Analytics. A little under half of the airdropped tokens were claimed.

The demand for the airdrop stress-tested the scaling capabilities of the solution and the team behind it tweeted:

“OP Drop #1 had a turbulent launch.”

The users experienced delays in claiming the airdrop because of immense traffic on the Optimism public RPC and the airdrop resulted in a huge increase in the number of transaction addresses on Optimism. The data shows that the number of transacting addresses surged by 150% from 7.6% to 19K in one day. It is also mandatory to bridge assets from Ethereum to Optimism and claim the airdrop, as the activity on bridges increased as well. The number of users using the Optimism bridge increased from 141 on May 30 to 3,981 accoridng to Dune Analytics.

According to the data from Etherscan, 71,439 wallets hold OP tokens and more than 88,300 addresses claimed the airdrop allocation and indicated that about 17,000 wallets dumped their tokens for profits. The leading crypto exchange Binance reported delays for deposits on the Optimism network because of increased user demand on the network. The listing of the OP token on Binance was delayed by an hour and the token now trades across different exchanges including Coinbase, Kucoin, Huobi, and OKX.

As earlier reported, The anticipated scaling solution Optimism airdrop is live for the OP governance token and nearly 249,000 wallets from the users and Ethereum users as well were eligible to claim the tokens. Optimism is a layer2 scaling solution for Ethereum which launched the anticiapted airdrop of the new OP governance token and rewarded the early users of the proejct and other ETH users by sending free tokens to about 249,000 eligible wallets.