Introduction

In May 2022, Optimism initiated its first airdrop and distributed more than 200 million OP tokens to reward early adopters and active users. As the governance system, Token House, matured, 88,000 addresses voted on proposals to distribute 55 million OP tokens and upgrade the protocol.

Since then, the Optimism Mainnet has shown remarkable growth, with over 1.5 million unique addresses and 64 million transactions. However, transaction fees have cost the community almost $15 million.

To encourage user involvement, Optimism held a second airdrop, awarding 11.7 million OP tokens to 307,965 addresses on May 9th.

The Goals & Methodology

In this study, we aimed to analyze the activities of Optimism's users who received OP tokens in 2022. We categorized the users into two groups: those who received Airdrop #1 and those who received Airdrop #2. We tracked their interactions in governance, NFT, swap, and other areas since 2022 to gain insights into how they participate in the ecosystem.

To understand user behavior, we divided users into several categories based on their activities, including "Just Stake" for those who delegated their tokens and participated in ecosystems’ voting, "Just Swap" for users who only used swapping platforms, "Just NFT" for those who primarily interacted with NFT marketplaces, and "Multi-Interaction" for those who engaged in two or more of these activities.

We also evaluated user retention for Airdrop #1 and Airdrop #2 receivers who did not receive the first airdrop.

Analysis

As aforementioned in introduction 11.74M OP tokens have been Airdropped among 308K unique wallets address.

How many of the Airdrop #2 receivers have received the Airdrop #1 tokens?

The PIE charts reveal that 28.1% of Airdrop #2 receivers also received tokens from Airdrop #1. This means that out of 308K receivers, 227.5K were not Airdrop #1 receivers, while only 80.4K users received tokens from both airdrops.

Despite the majority of Airdrop #2 receivers being secondary users (not received Airdrop #1), early users (those who have received Airdrop #1) received 82.4% of the 11.7 million OP tokens allocated in the second airdrop(80.4K unique users).

Are the top 100 airdrop #2 receivers the same as the top 100 airdrop # receivers?

The charts show the top 100 wallet addresses that have received the most airdrops. Out of the top 100 Airdrop #2 receivers, only 8 were also among the top 100 Airdrop #1 receivers, while the other 92 wallets were secondary users who received between 5 and 10K tokens. The early users received 66.24K tokens, which represents 9.5% of the tokens received by the top receivers, while the secondary users received 630K tokens, which represents 90.5% of the tokens received by the top 100 receivers.

Airdrop Receivers Retention

This section dealt with the retention of airdrop receivers #1 and 2 in the Optimism ecosystem.

There is a specific chart for Optimisms’ ecosystem contains the airdrop #1 receivers retention (since 2022).

Reading vertically (up to down) shows the product lifetime. comparing different cohorts at the same stage in their life cycle — we can see what % of people in a cohort are coming back to the chain after months and so on.

Reading horizontally (left to right) shows the lifetime — seeing the long-term relationship with people in cohort — to ascertain how long people are coming back and how strong or how valuable that cohort is.

Cohort column is the month that users(airdrop #1 receivers) had a transaction in the chain and we want to see how many of them had another transaction in the next 1 month, 2 months, etc.

The total Users Column is the number of total active users in the cohort month.

For example in the January cohort month, 20.1K unique users had at least a transaction in the Optimism chain. 1 month after (February) 43% of 20.1K users in January again transacted in the chain.

The users that were in the January & February are the most loyal users and 41 & 51% of these months users had other transactions 12 months later, respectively.

The Airdrop #1 Retention Query: Link

There is a specific chart for Optimisms’ ecosystem contains the airdrop #2 receivers retention (since 2022).

For airdrop #2 retention in the January cohort month, 1.199K unique users(airdrop #2 receivers) had at least a transaction in the Optimism chain. 1 month after (February) 34% of 1.199K users in January again transacted in the chain.

The users that were in the January & February are the most loyal users and 48 & 59% of these months users had other transactions 12 months later, respectively.

The Airdrop #1 Retention Query: Link

Interactions Fields for Airdrop Receivers

Airdrop #1 Receivers

This part has dealt with the fields of users' (airdrop receivers') interactions in Optimisms’ ecosystem.

The above chart illustrates the transaction count performed by airdrop #1 receivers, and it's apparent that the number of transactions increased over time, with a significant spike in late May caused by airdrop claiming. The chart below shows the cumulative growth in transaction count for these users. It indicates that users who participated in swaps and NFTs had the highest number of transactions, totaling 324K, followed by users involved in NFTs, swaps, and staking, with 256,040 transactions.

Airdrop #2 Receivers

In this part we tracked the airdrop #2 receivers interactions, those who didn’t received airdrop #1.

In contrast to the previous section, these users' interactions have shown a significant increase and peaked on January 9th, which was the date for claiming airdrop #2. As the following chart illustrates, NFT, swap, and staking were the most popular areas of activity for these users, with a total of 426.8K transactions, followed by all other action (active in all action types) with 377.6K transactions.

Distribution of Users by Their Action Type

Among the group of airdrop #1 receivers, 30% were involved in swap and staking activities, 23.5% were active in NFT, swap, and staking, and 20.7% were active in all types of activities. On the other hand, for airdrop #2 receivers, 25.5% were active in NFT, swapping, and staking, 22.6% were active in all types of actions, and 10% were involved in swapping and staking activities.

Conclusion

Based on these findings, we can infer that a significant portion of both airdrop #1 and #2 receivers have been actively engaging in the Optimism ecosystem, with many participating in various activities such as staking, swapping, and NFT trading. However, it's worth noting that the percentages of users engaging in these activities differ slightly between the two groups, indicating that the nature of the airdrop may influence the behavior of the recipients.

Moreover, the data suggests that early users who received both airdrops have received a higher percentage of tokens while the secondary users have been more active in the ecosystem compared to early users who only received airdrop #2. This may indicate that early users are more committed to the platform and more likely to participate more in delegate their token to ecosystem and validators that was the main consideration of Optimism foundation to distribute second round of airdrop.

Overall, these findings provide valuable insights into the behavior and engagement of Optimism's user base, which can be used to inform platform development and community engagement strategies.

This dashboard has been made for MetricDAO’s bounty by Flipsidecrypto’s database

Queries and Graphs: Link