Red-Hot Ethereum (ETH) Scaling Altcoin Launches New Airdrop Phase, Plans To Distribute 11,700,000 Tokens

A red-hot Ethereum (ETH) scaling altcoin launched the second phase of its highly anticipated airdrop early Friday morning.

The Optimism (OP) protocol, a layer-2 (L2) scaling tool for the Ethereum blockchain, plans to distribute a total of 11.7 million OP tokens to eligible users.

Optimism first announced the airdrop earlier this month, noting that eligible recipients include addresses that have delegated the voting power of their OP tokens and addresses that spent more than $6.10 on L2 gas since March 25th, 2022. The project notes that $6.10 is the average cost of a transaction on Ethereum layer-1.

Back in May 2022, Optimism launched its first airdrop, distributing more than 200 million OP tokens to 250,000 users. That first airdrop represented 5% of the total initial token supply, and the second, ongoing airdrop represents about 0.27% of the initial supply. Optimism has pledged to airdrop 19% of the total initial token supply to community members.

OP is trading at $2.86 at time of writing. The 78th-ranked crypto asset by market cap is down more than 4.5% in the past 24 hours but remains more than 210% up since the start of 2023 when it was trading around $0.92.

The project jumped in price on Wednesday after news broke that Base, a newly announced layer-2 scaling solution developed in conjunction with top US crypto exchange Coinbase, will be built on top of Optimism.

Generated Image: Midjourney