Free Tokens For Optimism Users: Ethereum Scalability Protocol Announces 'Many Airdrops'

Ethereum ETH/USD layer two scalability solution Optimism announced that it will airdrop — cryptospeak for "distribute free of charge" — its upcoming token called OP to those who interacted with its protocol in the past.

What Happened: In a Tuesday Twitter Inc. TWTR thread, Optimism announced the creation of the Optimism Collective, the organization's "experiment in digital governance at scale," which can be described as a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) with an original twist.

Like most DAOs, the Optimism Collective will be governed by the holders of a dedicated token — in this case, it will be the OP token that will be distributed free of charge. This token will be used to vote on protocol upgrades, project incentives and other critical protocol development issues.

Here comes the interesting part, in addition to OP token holder — which the thread calls Token House — the Optimism Collective is also governed by the Citizens' House, which governs public goods funding and manages the development of the protocol. Citizenship is acquired by receiving a non-transferrable non-fungible token (NFT) and the measure is meant to prevent plutocratic capture of the protocol.

The section dedicated to OP distribution of an Optimism post shows that 19% will be airdropped to users, 5% in the first airdrop and 14% in future airdrops. Furthermore, 25% will be devoted to the ecosystem fund, 20% to retroactive goods funding, 19% to core contributors and the remaining 17% to investors.

Optimism explains that its "bicameral governance system seeks to avoid governance pitfalls experienced by other models on Ethereum today."

The Optimism Foundation will keep a central role and "serve as a steward of the Collective" that runs governance experiments and bootstrapping the ecosystem before it finally completely dissolves. The organization that launched the Optimism protocol, Optimism PBC, has been renamed OP Labs PBC and will now focus on "building and decentralizing the protocol" and supporting projects that make use of it.