Optimism Price Declines After Airdrop
Optimism, a Layer-2 network, recently distributed 11.7 million tokens to over 300,000 wallets, boosting its circulating supply of OP tokens to 234.74 million.
Despite this, the value of the OP token declined by 13% in the past 24 hours, bringing it to $2.33 at the time of reporting.
Despite this setback, the OP token has performed exceptionally well this year, soaring by over 200% since January 1st. It reached a new all-time high of $3.20 on February 3rd.
According to a statement released on February 9th, the reason for the recent airdrop was to acknowledge and reward positive participation in governance and empower the “power users” of Optimism’s Mainnet.
The distribution of tokens is part of a larger plan to release 19% of its initial governance token supply. Its first airdrop in May 2022 released over 200 million tokens, accounting for approximately 5% of the total initial supply.
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To be eligible for the airdrop, users had to have spent more than $6.10 on gas since March 25th, 2022, or delegate the voting power of their OP tokens. Data from Dune Analytics showed that the average amount airdropped was $38.13, with the highest amount being $10,462.
On the other hand, the volume of transactions on the L2 network has remained stable, fluctuating between 160,000 and 200,000 after reaching its all-time high of 800,000.
Alexander Stefanov
Reporter at CoinsPress
Alex is Editor-in-Chief of Coinspress and co-founder of Millennial Media Group, with nearly a decade of experience covering financial markets - crypto first, then everything else. It started in 2016 with Bitcoin. Like most people at the time, he didn't fully understand it - so he kept digging. Blockchain, tokenomics, the projects, the cycles. That curiosity never stopped, and eventually pulled him into traditional markets too: equities, commodities, macro. Not because he left crypto behind, but because you can't properly understand one without the other. What drives him is straightforward: he wants to know why something is happening, not just that it's happening. Most market coverage stops at the headline - price up, price down, here's a chart. Alex finds that kind of reporting actively unhelpful. If you walk away from an article without understanding the mechanism behind the move, what did you actually learn? He holds a degree in Tourism from New Bulgarian University - not the most obvious path into financial markets, but markets have a way of pulling in people who are simply too curious to stay out. He has authored over 200 in-depth analyses and more than 10,000 articles across crypto and traditional finance. He still thinks every day in markets teaches him something new. That's probably why he hasn't stopped.
