Optimism airdrop overwhelmed by all-time high demand: ‘Scaling is hard’

cointelegraph.com:

Ethereum Layer-2 scaling solution Optimism has been overwhelmed with “all-time high demand” following the launch of its highly anticipated airdrop today.

Users racing to collect their tokens were greeted with failed or delayed transactions as the Optimism team raced in the background to add additional capacity to the network.

As previously reported in April, Optimism is airdropping the new OP governance token —over multiple phases — alongside the launch of a decentralized autonomous organization dubbed “The Optimism Collective.”

Nearly 250,000 addresses are able to receive the airdrop, with the eligibility set for Optimism early adopters and regular Ethereum users such as DAO voters, multi-sig signers and bridge users.

According to Optimism Status, the mainnet experienced degraded performance for roughly three and half hours, with the team “provisioning more capacity” to solve the issue. As a result, archive node functionality has remained limited temporarily until the network load subsides.

Optimism stated on Twitter that it will take the lessons it learnt from the first airdrop and apply them to the second round, while it will also publish an “extensive retrospective next week” detailing what went down.

There are a lot of lessons we learned from this to apply to Drop #2. We’ll be publishing an extensive retrospective next week. Iteration is core to the Optimism ethos and we always strive to apply today’s lessons to tomorrow’s problems.

Twitter users such as “OlimpioCrypto” were the first to announce the airdrop going live earlier today to their 35,400 followers, hours ahead of Optimism officially doing so.

As it stands, OP is available for trade on several centralized exchanges such as Coinbase OKX, Bybit, Gate.io,