#optimism

Optimism runs high in the crypto sector with the election of John Thune as the Republican leader in the U.S. Senate, particularly given the Republican control of both the Senate and Congress.

On October 9, 2024, the Optimism L2 blockchain team announced their 5th airdrop. As part of this event, 10.2 million OP tokens (roughly $16 million at current prices) will be distributed to 54,000 users.

Eric Balchunas, the Senior ETF analyst at Bloomberg, has scaled back his optimism regarding the approval of a spot Ethereum ETF, now assessing the chances at 35% by the May deadline. He emphasizes, however, that approval remains a possibility, especially looking ahead to the longer term.

Investment firm Hashdex, vying for a spot in the Bitcoin ETF race, has released a report titled "2024 Crypto Investment Outlook—Opportunity meets Optimism."

This week attack targeted KyberSwap’s Elastic pools, impacting funds across various blockchains, including Arbitrum, Ethereum, Polygon, Optimism, and Base.

Coinbase's blockchain, Base, has set a new daily transaction record, reaching 1.88 million transactions. This achievement surpasses its previous high of 1.41 million transactions, established shortly after its launch in August. Notably, this number surpasses the combined daily transactions of both Optimism and Arbitrum, which totaled 878,000 transactions.

Uniswap, the decentralized exchange, has revealed its proprietary L2 blockchain, Unichain, developed using the OP Stack from Optimism. According to the development team, this initiative is part of a strategy to enhance Ethereum’s scalability, leading to a major increase in payment efficiency.

Sony Block Solutions Labs, a collaborative venture between Sony Group and Startale, announced the launch of a new public L2 blockchain named Soneium, built on Optimism's OP Stack. This blockchain will be a part of the Superchain ecosystem. The testnet is set to be released in the upcoming days, with Sota Watanabe leading the project.

The Celo Foundation, the entity behind the L1 blockchain Celo, has successfully launched the Dango L2 testnet. Developed on the OP stack, Dango is now part of the Optimism Superchain ecosystem, which includes other projects like Base and Zora. The deployment of this L2 blockchain is a key component of the community's plan for migration to Ethereum.

Optimism, an L2 blockchain platform, has announced a $3.3 billion grant program in OP tokens (850 million tokens) aimed at backing projects, developers, and influencers who are creating valuable products and demonstrating their utility to the community. The grant distribution is set to occur over four rounds, from May 2024 to the year's end.

In an interview with CNBC, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong mentioned:

The lending platform has temporarily halted the Aave V2 protocol on Ethereum and frozen some assets on Aave V3 across Polygon, Arbitrum, and Optimism networks due to a discovered feature glitch.

OP Labs, backing the Optimism network, launched a testnet version of its novel fault-proof system aimed at bolstering both efficiency and decentralization. At present, OP Stack employs centralized sequencers to bundle and send transactions to Ethereum. However, this method prohibits users from challenging the process in case of fraudulent transactions.

However, it's not tied to quests... Layer 2 blockchain Optimism initiated its third wave of token distribution exclusively for OP delegators. To qualify for the rewards, participants needed to accumulate 18,000 points. The points were calculated by multiplying the number of delegated OP by the delegation days, which must exceed 7 days. If the delegate actively engaged in voting, a minimum of 9,000 points was required. There's no claiming process or forms to fill out! Tokens have been automatically sent straight to users' wallets. In total, over 19 million OP tokens have been distributed to 31,870 unique addresses.

The Optimism Governance has announced a direct distribution of unclaimed tokens from the inaugural airdrop. They aim to distribute (if not already done) 48 million OP across over 88,000 distinct addresses. This accounts for about 25% of all the addresses originally qualified to receive tokens. This decision was made to allow the team to shift their focus to other endeavors related to smart contracts and upcoming airdrops.