About the editor: Spencer Noon is Co-founder & General Partner at Variant Fund.

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Network Coverage
Coverage on Optimism, Uniswap, Velodrome, and Quixotic.

• On April 26th, Optimism announced on Twitter their plan to move towards a DAO structure. Part of this change was Optimism's OP token. For the initial allocation, 5% of the supply was announced to be a part of airdrop #1, proportionally rewarding addresses with a set of 6 criteria along with an overlap bonus. Along with past Optimism users, healthy network participants are also heavily rewarded. The initial airdrop distribution can be see in the picture attached.

• It is on May 31st that users started to be able to claim. Given the early hype, 50% of the tokens were claimed in under 18 hours. It has now been 10 days and ~70% of the 214m available tokens were claimed.

• With ~250k eligible addresses, an impressive 135k (55%) have claimed their share of the token. 3 more airdrops are also on the way, with allocation criteria still to be determined/announced.

• Optimism is an EVM-equivalent Layer 2 blockchain built on Ethereum. On April 26th, Optimism introduced the Optimism Collective, an experimental new governance structure consisting of a Citizens’ House and a Token House. The Token House launched on May 31st, where almost 250k addresses were eligible to claim and delegate OP tokens. This airdrop led the Optimism network to reach all-time highs: processed >490k transactions (🤯), submitted >1.6k batches to L1, and consumed 2.7% of L1 gas.

• OP token holders can delegate their voting power to others who vote on their behalf. About 37m (25%) of claimed OP is delegated, with ~35 delegates making up 80% of voting weight. The first votes went live on Jun 9th, to distribute OP Tokens to projects to help catalyze their growth on Optimism.

• Optimism reinvests all sequencer profits back in to the ecosystem via retroactive public good funding. In the week following Airdrop #1, users spent about 560 ETH in transaction fees. Minus the ~420 ETH needed to submit batches to Ethereum, Airdrop #1 resulted in about 140 ETH to fund public goods.

• Transaction fees paid by Optimism users are split between the protocol (Optimism sequencer) and supply-side participants (Ethereum miners). Protocol revenue typically makes up just a few percent of the total revenue. The OP airdrop on the 1st of June caused daily transaction fees to exceed $200k before falling back to near $50k.

• The airdrop caused a massive spike in the number of interacting addresses, which led to the total number exceeding 100k. Over 50k of those were new addresses that had no previous activity on Optimism.

• OP currently has a fully diluted market cap of around $5b. The protocol’s price-to-sales ratio is roughly 200, placing it between Ethereum and Polygon. However, unlike ETH and MATIC, OP is a governance token that can not be used to pay for transaction fees or to earn staking rewards.