The OP Airdrop Wasn’t On Point

June 1, 2022 / Unchained Daily / Laura Shin

Daily Bits✍️✍️✍️

Ropsten, Ethereum’s oldest PoW testnet, is expected to “merge” on June 8th. 👀
Zcash activated its NU5 upgrade and is now more private and scalable.
Digital asset investment inflows totaled $87 million for the week ending May 27th.
Elon Musk took a shot at Dogecoin creator Jackson Palmer over code from 2018.
Tron is now the third-largest blockchain in terms of total value locked (TVL).
Digital asset firm CoinShares reported a loss of $21.4 million from its exposure to UST.
Mirror Protocol was exploited for more than $2 million.
Nansen believes that Celsius controlled a wallet that was partly responsible for the collapse of Terra.

Today in Crypto Adoption…

UK Treasury published a recommendation for bolstering stablecoin protections in the wake of UST’s de-peg.
Fidelity Digital Assets plans to double its staff in 2022.
The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision wants to finalize its treatment of crypto-assets this year.
Mazda, a car manufacturer, joined the MOBI blockchain alliance.

The $$$ Corner…

Kroo, a London-based neobank, raised $33 million in a Series B funding round.
Alloy, a DeFi platform, raised $3 million in a pre-seed funding round.
Aptos Labs, the team hoping to revive Facebook’s Diem project, announced that PayPal Ventures participated in their $200 million funding round in March.

📈Your Market Update

✅ Green day for crypto!

BTC is up 1.46%: Trading at $31,700.12
ETH is down .15%: Trading at $1,943.52
BTC dominance: 43.68%
Crypto market: $1.38 trillion
Winner of the day (among the top 100): Waves → up 15%

*Data as of 5:30 pm ET Monday 5/31/2022

What Do You Meme?

What’s Poppin’?

OP Is Here (Officially)

Optimism, a rollup-based layer 2 solution built on Ethereum, launched its governance token (OP).

Yesterday marked the arrival of OP through an airdrop, with early users of Optimism having the ability to claim roughly 5% of the total supply of the tokens. Notably, this is the first of many airdrops, as the tokenomics of OP call for 19% of the tokens to be allocated as airdrops.

However, OP trading began before the official Optimism Twitter account announced the launch, as it appears traders were able to claim OP tokens by directly interacting with smart contracts before the team’s front-end was released. The early OP trading seemed to take the Optimism team, website, and chain by surprise, with the Optimism’s mainnet and public API experiencing “degraded performance” yesterday according to its status website.

“We have NOT officially announced yet, but we’re already experiencing an all-time high demand. We knew everyone would be excited, but holy cow—y’all just couldn’t wait for #OPSummer,” wrote the team yesterday afternoon on Twitter. “We’re working to heavily provision more capacity before our official announcement—in the meantime the public RPC may respond slowly.”

Data from CoinMarketCap shows that the price of an OP began trading at over $3.8 around noon ET. However, by the time Optimism officially announced that claims were live at 5:45 pm ET, the token was trading below $1.50, marking a ~70% decrease in price for those who were not able to claim directly from Optimism’s smart contracts.

As of press, 7:30 pm ET, OP was trading at $1.39 – giving Optimism a fully diluted market capitalization of $6.1 billion. This comes in a bit lower than projected, as Messari predictedthat Optimism would launch with a market cap of roughly $9 billion.

OP will govern the network via “The Optimism Collective,” a two-house governance system split between the Token House, which OP will be used for, and a “Citizens’ House,” which will utilize soul-bound NFTs for decision making. The Token House will launch immediately, while the Citizens’ House is set to go live later this year.

Optimism allows apps and users to achieve faster and cheaper transactions than on Ethereum while still leveraging Ethereum for secure settlements. According to L2Beats, Optimism is the second largest Ethereum rollup and has over $500 million in assets locked into its ecosystem of DeFi protocols.

For those of you who are eligible for the airdrop, you can use this link to claim.

On The Pod…

How Osmosis Is Trying to Improve the Crypto User Experience

Sunny Aggarwal, co-founder of Osmosis Labs, talks about how Osmosis is being built, the innovations that are coming, the reasons to use app chains, and much more. Show highlights:

how Sunny got into crypto
how the DAO hack turned him off Ethereum at first
how the scaling issues with Ethereum got him interested in the Cosmos vision of app-chains
why he is interested in Proof of Stake
what the vision of Cosmos is
how Sunny compares the evolution of blockchains with human evolution
why he thinks that Cosmos integrates the best of Bitcoin and Ethereum networks
why he thinks that having more than one Proof of Work chain is fundamentally insecure
which three technologies are necessary for Cosmos to succeed
what IBC and the Cosmos SDK do
why Sunny decided to build Osmosis
how automated market makers are massively underexplored
why UX is such a priority for the Osmosis team
why Sunny does not want to list the OSMO token on other exchanges
why Osmosis has a curated dex as well as a permissionless one
how Osmosis governance works
how security is provided on Osmosis
what superfluid staking is
how CosmWasm helps Osmosis compete with centralized exchanges
how Osmosis is solving frontrunning with threshold encryption
why the Osmosis team chose Axelar for bridging
whether Yuga Labs could have used an app chain

Book Update

My book, The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze, which is all about Ethereum and the 2017 ICO mania, is now available!

You can purchase it here: http://bit.ly/cryptopians