Optimism Announces Second Airdrop – OP Price Drops Sharply

In the early hours of today, the Optimism team surprised the community with an announcement of the second OP airdrop. The token’s price reaction is “deja vu all over again.”

Those who previously delegated their voting rights or paid gas fees on the Optimism layer-2 network received the OP token airdrop today (February 10).

Optimism confirmed that a total of 11,742,277.1 OP tokens (worth $28.5 million) were distributed to 307,965 wallet addresses, rewarding users based on the amount of delegated tokens. The tokens are also being used to offset some of the gas fees on the network.

The token rewards were multiplied for certain accounts that had delegated more than 20 OP at the snapshot time or had 54,367 OP delegated in a specific day. Users with transaction history on the network over the past 6 months or who spent more than $20 in gas fees were also eligible for the airdrop.

Following the announcement, the OP token price has experienced a steep decline, despite setting a new all-time high (ATH) on February 2, shortly after the project's Bedrock upgrade. Currently, OP has dropped nearly 13% due to profit-taking by investors, combined with the general market downturn, trading around $2.445.

The first major airdrop from Optimism in June 2022 was marked by significant volatility and turbulence. The price of OP tokens fluctuated wildly in the first 24 hours following the release, due to asynchronous listings on exchanges, early token claims by users, and technical glitches.

In fact, dissatisfaction with the airdrop dumping at that time led some members of the Optimism community to propose “punishing” those who did not act in alignment with the project's goals.