Kain Warwick tests Optimism’s fees after Dencun with massive 64,000-person airdrop

More than 64,000 SNX stakers received the airdrop.
The airdrop was launched by Synthetix's founder to test lower fees on Optimism following the Dencun upgrade.
It cost only around $4,000 to airdrop the tokens to all of the recipients.

More than 64,000 Synthetix users received an airdrop of a memecoin today on Optimism, a layer 2 network on the Ethereum blockchain.

The memecoin, dubbed LERNITAS, uses the ticker 2192 and depicts King Leonidas from the popular movie 300.

Memecoins are cryptocurrencies influenced by internet memes, pop culture phenomena, and trends that have gone viral. They have recently surged in popularity, causing trading volumes on popular chains like Ethereum and Solana to explode.

Unlike most memecoins that come from anonymous developers, LERNITAS was airdropped by Kain Warwick, the founder of Synthetix, a protocol that provides liquidity for decentralised derivatives exchanges.

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Warwick conducted the airdrop to test the transaction costs on Optimism after the Dencun upgrade, which went live on Wednesday. Users who staked SNX were eligible for the airdrop.

The Dencun upgrade encompassed a set of nine proposals for improving Ethereum, known as Ethereum Improvement Proposals.

Of these, EIP-4844 stands out as the most crucial, offering significant reductions in the expenses associated with operations on layer 2 networks.

Following the upgrade, transaction costs on some of Ethereum’s top layer 2s dropped by as much as 98%. On Optimism, the median transaction cost right before the upgrade went live was $0.50, and now, the median transaction cost is only $0.0089 — a 98.2% decrease.

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The cost to airdrop the LERNITAS tokens to the more than 64,000 recipients was only around $4,000, or $0.06 per recipient.

If the airdrop had been done prior to the Dencun upgrade, the cost would have been upward of $220,000.

Although Warwick airdropped the token today, he didn’t set up a liquidity pool for users to trade, stating that he will deploy a liquidity pool on decentralised exchange Uniswap tomorrow.

Still, that didn’t stop some users from deploying their own liquidity pools, albeit with very minimal liquidity. The token is priced at $0.00486 implying a fully diluted value of $10.6 million.

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