Glass Half Full on OPtimism

Vitalik has done it again. This time taking the Web3 world by storm with a piece on soulbound tokens (SBTs) – “a way to encode the trust networks of the real economy to establish provenance and reputation”. This 37-page report describes key issues in Web3 today and how the introduction of Souls and SBTs can solve them. The idea of non-transferrable soulbound NFTs has actually been toyed with by Vitalik in the past. Optimism recreates this inspiration by drawing on the same soulbound post by Vitalik and creating the concept of “Citizens”. Citizenship is one of two parts of Optimism’s governance model and forms the foundation on which all its novel concepts are based. Optimism will essentially be one of the first public applications of SBTs on an ecosystem-wide scale.

Alongside Citizens will be OP token holders, newly minted thanks to the airdrop announcement which sent ripples across the crypto community as a long-anticipated event. Details on this airdrop, as well as opportunities on how to receive more OP in the future, are discussed later in the report.

How Did The Ecosystem React

As expected, the recent announcements had a directly positive effect on Optimism’s statistics.

Ecosystem daily active users breakout Apr 18 due to anticipation for the OP airdrop announcement on Apr 26th. Number of daily transactions also experience an increase but is slight. A more noticeable jump occurs after the OP stimpack announcement on May 3rd. OP stimpack refers to an airdrop that retroactively benefits existing dapps, which in turn typically choose to use these airdrops to incentivize their user activity.

Fees earned per day also benefitted from the airdrop and stimpack announcement with the first spike correlating with the former and the second spike with the latter. Prior to these announcements fees earned were muted, averaging <50ETH per day.

The graph above features the top 4 projects in Optimism according to their total number of transactions. Even among this premier group Perpetual Protocol is noticeably outsized, making up the majority of transactions in the ecosystem, accounting for 66% of the total in the last 30 days. On the week of 09 May, Perpetual Protocol was announced to be the largest recipient of the OP stimpack with (9M OP) which justifies the sharp spike in its user activity.