Consensys’ Ethereum layer 2 Linea launched its LINEA token on Tuesday, but the airdrop was far from seamless – a number of users reported issues with the claim process and failed transactions.

The network also saw a halt in block production for about 45 minutes before the LINEA airdrop, caused by performance degradation of the mainnet sequencer.

The airdrop still went live as planned after the issue was mitigated, with 749,000 wallets eligible to claim 9.36 billion LINEA tokens. But immediately after the Token Generation Event (TGE), the network saw a spike in gas as users were unable to claim their tokens.

The Linea team told users in their official Discord channel that Infura nodes were experiencing heavy loads in light of claim traffic. However, users who qualified to receive LINEA tokens on Binance Alpha received their tokens instantly.

This story is an excerpt from the Unchained Daily newsletter.

“The LINEA tokens were sent to the claim contract 50 minutes late for airdrop users, while Binance users were already claiming and dumping instantly,” wrote X user 0xZackHQ.

Head of Linea Declan Fox responded to 0xZackHQ, saying that the delay was because the network was overloaded with transactions before the airdrop went live. 

“The majority of the launch went well. We activated over 15 exchange listings for a new token. And once you get punched in the ring, you need to react well, which we did,” said Fox.

As of 6 am ET, Linea’s status page showed the network had been subject to a “partial outage” spanning close to 10 hours.