Optimism Community Discusses Excluding Token Sellers From Future Airdrops

An Optimism community member has proposed to exclude airdrop token sellers from future protocol airdrops on the basis that they were only interested in profit and not governance. The idea has been met with resistance. 

Excluding Token Sellers From Future Benefits

An Optimism community member by the name of 0xJohn has sparked controversy by suggesting on the Optimism Governance Forum on May 31 that users who sold their initial airdrop should not be eligible for any future protocol airdrops.

0xJohn argued in his post that sellers were choosing profit over contributing to the governance of the protocol and should therefore be excluded from any future distribution of Optimism tokens. He identified four wallets that had sold their airdropped OP tokens for prices ranging between $38,000 and $48,000 but claimed to have found “many more” using Dune Analytics.

Optimism is a layer-2 scaling solution that aims to enable low-cost and near-instantaneous Ethereum transactions. It has captured over $800 million on-chain value and claims to have saved Ethereum users over $1 billion in gas fees. 

0xJohn’s proposal prompted a response from crypto personality Cobie, who sarcastically suggested going further by (among other things) extending the punishment to anyone having sold any token in the last six months, canceling the governance power of sold tokens, and unleashing physical violence against airdrop sellers.

The Optimism Governance Forum unlisted the satirical post, restored it, flagged it as inappropriate, then restored it one more time. The Optimism Forum’s ambiguous stance over the freedom of expression of its community members drew criticism from the broader crypto community on Twitter.

It also motivated Cobie to offer a more serious response to 0xJohn’s proposal, in which he provided examples of legitimate instances in which airdrop sellers may still be interested in participating in Optimism governance further down the line. Cases cited included tax obligations, portfolio rebalancing, risk management, or privacy issues. 

The discussion comes a day after Optimism launched its OP token by airdrop. Early adopters of the Layer 2 platform were awarded a certain number of tokens for either bridging to Optimism in the early stages of the mainnet, repeatedly using Optimism applications, participating in governance, or for being priced out of the Ethereum network. Each OP coin is currently trading for about $1.23.

Disclosure: At the time of writing, the author of this piece owned ETH and several other cryptocurrencies.