Good day everyone,
I hope you are all having a good day, welcome to CryptoGod-1's blog on all things crypto. In this post I will be looking at ups and downs of the Optimism token $OP, which is used here on Publish0x as a tipping token.
$OP: A Year Since the ATH
What a year it has been. No not 2025, but the calendar year since the 6th of March 2024. What was so special about that date? It's when Optimism ($OP) reached its all-time high of $4.84, according to CoinGecko. Times were good and everybody expected great things down the line for $OP. Now in March 2025 we have seen $OP crash below the $1.00 mark for the first time since early January 2023.
What a journey it has been. With the current price of $OP hovering around the $0.953 mark, the first few months of 2025 have been nothing but a downward direction for the Ethereum layer-2 token. A year ago $OP was being included among the 100% profit club, which also included Bitcoin (BTC), Mantle (MNT), and Starknet (STRK). Why such a decline in the space of 12 months? Even the rally around Trump's election, which caused a pump in the market, saw $OP fail to breach the $3.00 mark once again.
So what happened? Well Optimism began back in 2019 when Plasma Group was establish. They noted themselves as a non-profit group working on Ethereum scalability. In mid 2019 they incorporated the work of Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buteri into their rollup, and from there Optimism was born. In January 2020, the Plasma Group entity was dissolved to make way for Optimism Public Benefit Corporation (Optimism PBC).
The main players behind Optimism are PBC are Benjamin Jones, Karl Floersch, Jing Wang and Kevin Ho. A soft launch of the Optimism mainnet took place in January 2021, and the team took a “defenses-in-depth” approach. This basically means they took an incremental approach consisting of a multi-level deployment combined with audits to validate each stage. Once each stage was deemed secure and confidence in the project began to grow these 'brakes' were relaxed.
- First level of defense: Deploying contracts with permission.
This step involves protecting against malicious contracts.
To limit this risk, the team has temporarily deployed a registry of smart contract programmers. - Second level of defense: Authenticated withdrawals.
At this stage, the Optimism team has set up a withdrawal verification system to stop potential misappropriations before they reach layer 1. - Third level of defense: Administration keys.
In the event of an emergency, these keys enable you to intervene directly on the smart contract and integrate updates.
Once all their security and required test were successful the team fully launched the mainnet to the public on December 16, 2021.
Optimism is an Ethereum layer 2 network, meaning its objective is to relieve the mainnet (layer 1) by managing transactions outside the network. Currently there are four different types of layer 2 network - sidechains, plasma, channels and rollups. Optimism makes use of rollups, meaning its security is provided directly by Ethereum via a connection made by a smart contract. These method allows transactions to be processed outside the Ethereum blockchain (“off chain”) and once they are completed they are put back on chain, i.e. they are sent to Ethereum by sequencers for recording.
2022 ended up being a pivotal year for Optimism as they introduced the Optimism Foundation, the Optimism Collective and the $OP token. Of the tokenomics, 19% have been set aside for airdrops. So far 4 airdrops have taken place.
- Airdrop 1 (June 2022) : 5% of OP tokens at 248,699 addresses;
- Airdrop 2 (February 2023) : 11,742,277.1 OP to 307,965 addresses ;
- Airdrop 3 (September 2023) : 19,411,313 OPs at 31,870 addresses;
- Airdrop 4 (February 2024) : 10,343,757.81 OP to 22,998 addresses.
With a maximum of 4,294,967,296 $OP tokens, the tokenomics is broken down as follows:
The $OP token has some standout features, which includes
- Low gas fees: The mainnet is designed to ensure lower transaction fees for users compared to the Ethereum L1 layer. The average gas fees on the OP Mainnet was $0.02 compared to $1.81 on Ethereum, according to Blockchair.
- Faster Transactions: The speed of transactions on L2 chains are much faster than those on the Ethereum L1 layer. The average time between blocks on the OP Mainnet was 2 seconds compared to 12 seconds on Ethereum, according to Blockchair.
- The Challenge Period: The $OP mainnet offers a time period to users, which is currently set at 7 days. It means they have the option to challenge the validity of transactions.
- Permissionless: The $OP mainnet is a public and permissionless blockchain, meaning that anyone can use it.
- OP Stack: This is a key piece of blockchain development infrastructure within the Optimism ecosystem. Its opensource, L2 development kit, which can be used by anybody to create an L2 chain.
- Superchain: Due to Optimism being a L2 chain, it promotes an interoperable ecosystem of L2 chain known as the Superchain. Any L2 chain created using the OP Stack can join the Superchain.
All good news so far, but while these are the strengths of the token, there are also drawbacks. As of March 2025, 61.1% of total OP token in circulation was held by whales. This is of course considered a risk as any high concentration of a token's supply means the whales have the opportunity to influence the market and cause price movements when they buy or sell large quantities of a cryptocurrency.
It is also important to note that while a high level of the token is held by whales, the majority of tokens are being held in wallets with a value of less than $1,000 $OP. According to CoinMartetCap, 97.1% of tokens are held in these wallets. At the beginning of March 62.52% of OP’s circulating supply is being held by long-term holders who have held their assets for over a year.
The volatility shown by $OP over the past year has mainly come about due to the high number of token unlocks. These have deterred $OP tokens from gaining positive price momentum. According to Token Unlocks, only 35% of OP token’s total supply has been unlocked. A further 31.34 million tokens are due to unlock in 22 days time.
From May 2023 up until May 2026 there will be a total of 1.546 billion $OP tokens allocated to contributors and investors unlocked. This will likely continue to have a negative impact on the price of $OP with the supply continuing to rise. However it is not all doom and gloom. Given that Ethereum is focused on scaling its blockchain via L2 chains such as Optimism then there is plenty of scope for growth. So far Optimism has proved itself to be a strong and reliable network. The Superchain initiative also aims to solve the problem of liquidity fragmentation brought on by the plethora of L2 chains out there so it is certainly something to keep an eye on. Chains such as Coinbase’s Base, Uniswap’s Unichain, Sony’s Soneium and Kraken’s Ink have agreed to join the Superchain.
The project’s lofty ambitions to spearhead Ethereum’s rollup-centric scaling roadmap and to solve L2 interoperability issues means it is a key player in the layer 2 space. While the token unlocks will continue to hinder the price growth of $OP, the long term outlook is bright as Optimism looks to evolve into a decentralised sequencing operation.
As $OP is used as a tipping token on Publish0x it is likely quite noticeable to users that the value of $OP has plummeted. This can be viewed in two ways.
The first is that your holdings are worth less now. That is obvious. If you hold some $OP on Publish0x it is clear to see that the amount held is worth more than the $ value equivalent. Those hoping to gain their fortune from posting will be downtrodden and dismayed, but it is not all bad news.
The second way to look at things is that now is the best time to publish and accumulate. Tips in $OP generate more $OP now than ever before. The monthly amount of $OP you can generate for your monthly posting is higher than it has ever been, meaning your stack will grow quicker. Sure its value is currently less, but as we are all well aware the crypto market is prime for swings. What is worth less than a $1.00 today was worth more than $4.00 a year ago, and there is no reason to believe it cannot surpass this level once again in the coming months and years.
Keep in there. Keep posting. Keep gaining and growing your $OP and $ETH. Watch its value rise when the market trends upwards once again.
Have a great day.
Peace. CryptoGod-1.
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