Optimism, the Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution, recorded an all-time demand following the launch of its much-awaited airdrop. Users tussled to get their tokens. But the airdrop was riddled with failed or delayed transactions. As such, the Optimism team to add additional capacity to the network.
The platform had announced in April that it would airdrop the new OP governance token over multiple phases, with the launch of a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) called “The Optimism Collective”. Around 250,000 addresses received the airdrop.
The mainnet, as per the Optimism Status, experienced degraded performance for about three and a half hours. The team came up with the additional capacity to solve the issue, but the archive node functionality remains temporarily limited until the network load subsides. Optimism said it would take lessons from the first airdrop and apply it to the second round. It plans to publish an extensive retrospective next week. The team highlighted that OP had a turbulent launch which was stabilized after more than five hours of non-stop work.
Optimism tweeted that while the sequencer remained stable throughout, this was the point where read-access was able to handle the load. It also said that iteration is core to the Optimism ethos. It acknowledged that the Optimism network was struggling to support the demand. The team strives to apply the lessons learned to tomorrow’s problems.
Martin Koppelmann, the co-founder of Ethereum Virtual Machine-compatible blockchain Gnosis, believes Optimism is one of the leading projects tackling Ethereum’s scaling issues. But the airdrop also highlighted that scaling is hard. Koppelmann said he doesn’t want to sound negative as he considers the project as one of the leading ones to tackle scaling and them running into scaling issues just shows how hard the problem is.
OP is available for trade on a number of centralized exchanges like OKX, Coinbase, Gate.io, Bybit, Uniswap, and MEXC Global among others.
