First published 1 June 2022, the day after the token claim opened. Expanded in October 2026 so OP is not described as the fee, and so a later airdrop is not described as the first one still being open. Optimism is a rollup. Transactions are batched and posted to Ethereum, and they can be challenged for about a week before a withdrawal through the official bridge is final on Ethereum. OP is the governance token. ETH pays the fee, on this chain, not on Ethereum. What is Arbitrum (ARB)? is the other well-known rollup of that year. Gas there is also ETH. OP is not ARB, and ETH on one is not ETH on the other. Ethereum without the jargon is the chain underneath.
The initial supply was 2 to the 32nd, about 4.29 billion. The first claim, on 31 May 2022, sent about 200 million OP to about 249,000 addresses. It is closed. About 19 percent of the initial supply was set aside for airdrops, and later rounds have used more of that slice, each with its own list and its own window. A link in a chat that says claim OP, and asks for a recovery phrase, is not those pages. A wallet signature is not a handshake.
Chain id 10, and a contract that was not there
OP Mainnet uses chain id 10. An address starts with 0x and is not an Ethereum address. In the launch week, 20 million OP sent to a market maker’s address on Optimism had no contract deployed there to own it. Someone else deployed one and took the tokens. Most were later returned. The lesson is the address. A contract that exists on Ethereum does not exist on Optimism until it is deployed there. This page will not describe how that address was taken. The wrong network is still the wrong city.
A withdrawal through the official bridge back to Ethereum waits about a week, the challenge window, and then someone has to finish it on Ethereum. A faster bridge is a different company. A bridge is extra software, not a tunnel.
OP votes in a Token House. A second house, for citizens, was built to fund public goods and can veto some upgrades. A vote is not a dividend of the fees. The OP Stack is the software other chains are built with. Coinbase Base is an L2 product, not a new Ethereum. is one of those chains. OP there, if any, is not OP here. Nothing here is an instruction to bridge, to vote, or to buy OP.
