Ethereum’s Optimism Unveils New Token With Entire Airdrop Season

Ethereum scalability solution Optimism revealed their governance token, called OP. This will mark the beginning of a transformation process for the Optimism ecosystem. It aims and providing users with more power with a unique governance system.

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Control via two entities, the Citizens’ House and the Token House, each with its own responsibilities and the common goal of supporting a sustainable ecosystem.

The latter will be established by the first OP Airdrop and will enable users to onboard the governance model. In that sense, OP holders will have a voice in the future of the project and will be able to vote on upgrades, incentives, and more.

The Citizens’ House will operate as an entity to “distribute retroactive public goods funding. The entity will take the network’s revenue and direct them to “help grow the collective”. Users can become citizens by going through a process called “souldbound” involving a non-transferrable NFT.

The Citizens’ House is expected to launch at some point in 2022.

The team behind Optimism referred to their new governance model as a “large-scale experiment in digital democratic governance” which they called the Optimism Collective. The new token OP is at the center of this experiment’s incentive system.

You Can Still Be Eligible For The Ethereum Optimism Airdrop

The OP token will go live in Q2, 2022, via a first airdrop. Around 250,000 addresses are eligible for the event, but as the team behind Optimism said, the token will have a “season of airdrops” with plenty of room for users to participate.

The token will be native to the Ethereum second layer solution and will purposely have an easy to remember address in an attempt to prevent scams: 0x420000000000000000000042. Still, the team behind the project recommended:

Please triple check that you are interacting with the right token. Note that Airdrop #1 has not yet occurred, and anything claiming you can get OP tokens today is a scam.

5% of the token will be distributed in this first airdrop with 14% destined for future events. 20% will be distributed to retroactive public goods funding, 17% to early investors, 19% to core contributors, and 25% to the ecosystem fund. OP’s supply will be unlocked according to the following schedule:

The inventor of Ethereum Vitalik Buterin and other members of the crypto community reacted to the announcement. The airdrop was highly anticipated and seems to be meeting expectations at this early stage. Buterin said:

Possibly the biggest attempt at non-token-holder-centric DAO governance so far. Excited to see where this goes.

New Token, New Foundation

The governance model will be stewarded by the Optimism Foundation. A new entity that will run this system “on behalf of the Collective” before it gets dissolved eventually.

The Optimism Foundation will be led by two of the project’s co-founders Ben Jones and Jing. Both occupied senior positions in Optimism PBC, the company in charge of developing the Ethereum scalability solution.

The Optimism Foundation will operate as a bridge as the project migrates to full decentralization. In that sense, the team behind the project also announced that Optimism PBC will be renamed OP Labs PBC and will be in charge of “building and decentralizing the protocol” and supporting the ecosystem.

OP Labs will be led by Liam Horne, former Head of Engineering at Optimism PBC. The new company will be supported by Karl Floersch, Josh Stein, Julien Boedec, Bobby Dresser, and others.

The ultimate goal of the announced entities is to make Optimism more decentralized while the project is able to scale its values with Web3 incentives. This so-called experiment has been created to avoid the governance structure of Web2 companies and grow beyond the technology.

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The team behind Ethereum Optimism concluded the following:

In the meantime, bridge your ETH ahead of our next chapter and get ready. Even if you don’t qualify for Airdrop 1, with more airdrops and governance on the way, there’s never been a better time to use Optimism. This is a historic milestone for both Optimism and the L2 ecosystem at large (…).

At the time of writing, ETH’s price trades at $2,800 with a 6% loss in the daily chart.