Introduction

Optimism is a layer 2 scaling solution for Ethereum. It aims to provide lower fees and faster transactions compared to Ethereum mainnet. How is this possible? Optimism does this by rolling up transaction data from the main chain, bundling it into single batches, and then settling them. This data is sent back to Ethereum’s mainnet to be validated as another added data block. This means that the transaction fee can be split over more transactions, resulting in lower transaction fees per transaction.

To reward the early users of Optimism, a total of 5% of the total supply of the $OP token was airdropped. This comes down to about 215 million $OP tokens. About 249K early Optimism users were eligible for the Airdrop that happened on May 31st 2022.

In this dashboard, we’ll look at important statistics regarding the airdrop, such as how many users claimed the airdrop and how many tokens were claimed. We’ll look at the claims over time and what users did with the airdropped tokens.

Overview

Claims over time

What did users do with their airdropped tokens?

Methodology

We first select all claim transactions in the same way above. We truncate the block_timstamp to day format and take the sum of all $OP tokens that were claimed per day.

We take the cumulative sum of the amount of $OP that was claimed using

sum(daily_claimed) over (order by day asc rows between unbounded preceding and current row). We then divide each day’s cumulative sum by the total amount of $OP available to get the daily percentage claimed.

A similar method was used for the percentage of eligible users that claimed over time. However, we now need to find the daily number of new claimers which requires another method. To do this, we find the first day a user claimed using min(date). We then count the number of users that have the same first day to get the daily number of unique new claimers. Finally, we divide by the total number of users eligible per day to get the daily percentage of eligible users that have claimed.

Analysis

It is clear that most users claimed on the first few days that the airdrop went live on May 31st. On the first day, 16% of all eligible users claimed their airdrop. On the second day it was much higher at 45%. after which, the number of new users claiming their airdrop quickly decreased.

The same trend applies to the percentage of available $OP tokens that were claimed.

I think most users have actively used Optimism for the airdrop. That would explain why most users claimed the airdrop in the first few days. The minority of users that are eligible (that did not know they were eligible) most likely were the ones that claimed at a much later date.

As of today, 74.4% of all available tokens have been claimed and 60.6% of all eligible users have claimed their tokens.

Methodology

Airdrop claim transactions were found using the optimism.core.fact_token_transfers table in combination with the airdrop claim address: 0xfedfaf1a10335448b7fa0268f56d2b44dbd357de.

Then, we use the $OP contract address to select the $OP claims: 0x4200000000000000000000000000000000000042.

We then count the number of distinct users that claimed the airdrop using count(distinct(claimer)).

The total amount of $OP tokens that we claimed was calculated by taking the sum of all claim transactions.

The number of total $OP available and the number of users eligible was found in

Methodology

We estimate the action of the users using the following method:

We first select all airdrop claim transactions with the method described in the previous methods and select all users that claimed their airdrop. We then look at all $OP transfers and sell swaps from those counts using the tables optimism.sushi.ez_swaps and optimism.core.fact_token_transfers. We sum all the $OP these users have transferred and sold via Sushiswap. If the transferred or sold amount is larger than the amount that was airdropped to the user, we assume that the users sold or transferred all their tokens. If the users have transferred or sold less than the airdropped amount we assume the users have sold or transferred a part of the airdropped tokens. Finally, if the users have no $OP sell or transfer transactions, we assume that the users still hold the airdropped tokens.

We use a similar method for the delegations of $OP tokens. We select delegate transactions using optimism.core.fact_event_logs where event_name = 'DelegateVotesChanged'. We use the new_balance and

previous_balance to calculate how much was delegated. We then take the sum of all delegations for each user and again see if the total delegations are smaller or larger than the total amount of $OP that was airdropped to the user.

Key findings

• As of today, 60.6% of all eligible users have claimed their tokens and 74.4% of all tokens have been claimed.
• Most users and tokens were claimed in the first few days after the airdrop went live.
• On the second day, 60% of all available tokens were already claimed and almost half the eligible users claimed their tokens.
• 22% of users are still holding their airdropped tokens, while 57% of users have fully transferred the tokens to other wallets.
• 40% of users have fully delegated their $OP tokens, while an almost equal percentage has not delegated any airdropped tokens.

Analysis

Using this method, we can see that about 22% of all users that claimed the airdropped are still holding their tokens. This means that the rest (or about 78%) have either partially or fully transferred or sold their airdropped tokens. Most users have transferred all tokens, about 57%. Of course, transferring the tokens does not necessarily mean that the user has sold.

When it comes to delegations we can see that there is a rough 1/3 split among the three categories. About 40% of users delegated all their airdropped tokens, while an almost equal percentage made no delegations at all using their $OP tokens.