One of Ethereum’s top Layer 2 scaling projects, Optimism, announces the launch of a DAO titled ‘Optimism Collective’ along with an entire season of airdrops of their governance token OP.
In Brief:
- The primary OP airdrop set to take place in Q2 2022 is going to establish the Token house.
- The Citizens’ House is scheduled to launch sometime this year.
- Optimism Collective aims to get beyond Web2 corporations’ governance structures.
The Optimism Collective will have a house system with a Token House and a Citizens’ House dividing governance powers. Optimism’s creators called their new governance concept a “large-scale experiment in digital democratic government”.
The first OP Airdrop will establish Token House, which will let users join the DAO. In this way, OP holders will have a say in the project’s future, with the ability to vote on enhancements, incentives, etc.
The Citizens’ House will function as a vehicle for distribution of retroactive public goods funding. It will take the network’s profits and use them to assist in the collective’s growth.
Optimism will add users to the Citizens’ House by distributing soulbound NFTs that cannot be sold or bought. The multiparty system is designed to counteract the potential corporatist inclinations of token-based governance.
The Citizens’ House is scheduled to launch sometime this year. The Optimism Collective’s incentive structure revolves around the new token OP.
A first airdrop of the OP token will take place in Q2 2022. The event is limited to 250,000 addresses, but the Optimism team has stated that the token will have a season of airdrops with plenty of opportunities for people to participate.
In order to avoid scams, the token will be native to the Ethereum second layer solution and will have an easy-to-remember address, ‘0x420000000000000000000042.’
19% of the tokens are reserved for user airdrops with 5% set to be distributed in the first airdrop event and 14% reserved for future events. 20% will go to retroactive public goods funding, 17% to early investors, 19% to core contributors, and 25% to the ecosystem fund.
The team further added “Please triple check that you are interacting with the right token. Note that Airdrop #1 has not yet occurred, and anything claiming you can get OP tokens today is a scam.”
The Optimism Foundation will oversee the governance mechanism and manage the system on behalf of the Collective. As the initiative moves towards full decentralization, the Optimism Foundation will serve as a bridge.
Ben Jones and Jing, two of the project’s co-founders, will lead the Optimism Foundation. Optimism PBC, the company in charge of building the Ethereum scaling solution, has both of them in vital roles.
Optimism PBC will be rebranded as OP Labs PBC, and will be in charge of developing and decentralizing the protocol as well as supporting the ecosystem, according to the project’s team.
Liam Horne, the former Head of Engineering at Optimism PBC, will lead OP Labs, which will be backed by Karl Floersch, Josh Stein, Julien Boedec, Bobby Dresser, and others.
The declared entities’ ultimate purpose is to decentralize Optimism while allowing the project to scale its values through Web3 incentives. This DAO was created to get beyond Web2 corporations’ governance structures and expand beyond the technology.
The DAO announcement drew positive reactions from Vitalik Buterin and other members of the crypto community. The airdrop is long-awaited and it appears to be meeting the expectations thus far.
While Optimism and Arbitrum are now Ethereum’s two most powerful scaling tools, this is expected to change if ZK-Rollups such as StarkWare’s StarkNet obtain attention. Last week DeFi protocol MakerDAO revealed to incorporate StarkNet as part of its multi chain strategy to boost DAI token’s functions.
