OP Token Breakdown

Optimism, an EVM equivalent optimistic rollup chain that derives its security from Ethereum, launched its airdrop of the OP token on May 31. The scaling solution secures over $922 million of TVL, representing a 21% market share among Ethereum rollups with 43 protocols live on the chain. The 4.3 billion OP genesis token supply included a 19% allocation for airdrops, with 5% reserved for airdrop #1.

Optimism Primer

Optimism is an optimistic rollup that provides a cheaper and faster alternative to Ethereum mainnet without sacrificing its security guarantees. Transactions are immediately accepted or rejected by a centrally controlled sequencer in the order that they are received. This allows for nearly instant transaction confirmations and state updates but sacrifices decentralization in its current state. Batches of transactions are periodically submitted to Ethereum mainnet to be finalized, with gas fees amortized across all users to create a much cheaper alternative.

All Optimism blocks are stored on the canonical transaction chain (CTC), an append-only list inside of a smart contract that resides on Ethereum. The CTC contains code that deems existing blocks unmodifiable. However, if a reorganization larger than 50 blocks were to occur on Ethereum, a reorganization would occur on Optimism. It is worth noting that such an event is unlikely to occur because Ethereum was engineered to prohibit such instances. To produce blocks, Optimism nodes download blocks from the append-only list within the CTC to reconstruct them in the standard Ethereum block format.

Optimism uses the same EVM, account and state structure, and gas mechanism/fee schedule as Ethereum. The Optimism team refers to this architecture as EVM Equivalence and allows for easy integrations of Ethereum native dapps. Additionally, the Optimism client software closely resembles Geth, currently the primary client run on Ethereum’s execution layer.

As an optimistic rollup, Optimism relies on fault proofs whereby all state commitments are assumed to be valid unless they are challenged by a party observing the chain within a seven-day period. Users therefore have to wait seven days to withdraw funds through the official bridge of Optimism back to Ethereum.