Optimism (OP) continues to shine in the spotlight since the start of the year. The Ethereum layer 2 scaling solution surprised its users with a second airdrop on Thursday.

Optimism’s second airdrop allocated 11.7 million OP tokens to those users who have delegated the voting power of their OP tokens and spent more than $6.10 on layer 2 gas since March 25, 2022.

A snapshot of the airdrop was taken on January 20, 2023. Optimism stressed that users don’t need to claim their tokens if they’ve met the requirements. The tokens have already been sent to the eligible addresses.

The second airdrop is significantly smaller than the first one. Optimism distributed more than 200 million tokens to users in June of last year. The team behind the project also said that it’s going to do more airdrops in the future.

While users benefited from the second airdrop, the OP token itself reacted negatively to the news.

Optimism’s governance token OP dumped on the news that the project is doing a second airdrop to its users.

OP went down by almost 9% from the 24-hour high of $2.54 to $2.32 following the airdrop announcement, according to data from CoinGecko. It’s currently trading at around $2.37, having gone down around 15% in the last seven days.

Despite the sharp decline in price following the airdrop, OP remains one of the best performing tokens since the start of the new year. It went from $0.913 at the start of the year to an all-time high of $3.19 on February 3, a staggering 250% increase.

However, industry observers have pointed out that OP has one of the worst unlock schedules in 2023. According to TokenUnlocks, only around 214 million OP tokens out of the total 4.29 billion are currently in circulation. 

On top of that, $5.1 million worth of OP tokens is being emitted daily, which further dilutes the token’s value.

Optimism is one of the most used Ethereum layer 2 scaling solutions. It’s welcoming to see Optimism rewarding its users for active participation in the ecosystem. Those users who want to be eligible for the next airdrop should consider interacting with the Optimism ecosystem and following the project more closely.