Is it L2 Chain Airdrop Season?

If you like learning about Web3, blockchain, NFTs, and tech, subscribe to our free newsletter! We post 3x a week with the occasional blog deep-dive! And if you haven't yet, follow me on Twitter!

gm friends, a lot has happened this week in Web3. Here's some things that just minted👇

• 📈  Optimism airdrop launched last week. Is Arbitrum next?
• 🎥 Not a strange world after all
• 🍽 If you like NFTs and food, wait till you see this

Estimated read time: 4 minutes

What's all this talk about Optimism?

"Dude, I just got a free 1 ETH for bridging 0.01 ETH to Optimism" was all over my Twitter timeline last week. Optimism, the layer 2 scaling solution for Ethereum, released the claim to their airdrop for their DAO called The Optimism Collective powered by the token $OP last week.

While this was just the initial drop, early adopters were rewarded for participating with the platform. The following criteria were:

• Early Optimism User: Using Optimism before 6/23/2021 would yield you 776.86 OP per wallet
• Repeat Optimism User: Interacting with Optimism at least once across 4 weeks would yield 2469.35 OP per wallet
• DAO Voters: Regularly participating in Ethereum DAOs (Bravo, Aave, Curve) would yield 271.83 OP per wallet.
• Multisig signers: 10 transactions with a Gnosis Safe or multisig time lock/dailylimit wallet would yield 1190.26 OP per wallet
• Gitcoin Donors on L1: would receive 555.92 OP per wallet
• Users Priced Out of Ethereum:  Users who have bridged to other chains and still actively participate on Ethereum were given 409.42 OP per wallet

Additionally, there were overlap bonuses if you met 4 or more of the above criteria. With $OP currently at $1.20, users were given hundreds to thousands of dollars from the airdrop.

Alright, so we know being "early" gets you paid in Web3. How do we prepare ourselves for the next one? For me, I like to look at the other major L2 chains: Arbitrum, zkSync, and Starkware.

With the ETH 2.0 Merge coming soon, there still is a scalability problem. Most people assume gas fees will magically go away from this merge, but this will happen later when additional solutions such as sharding are implemented. Therefore, a ton of users and dApps will still look for L2 solutions, and this is how we can start creating activities to prepare for an airdrop.

Why Arbitrum?

First, Arbitrum has the largest TVL out of all L2s and has not yet released a token. Next, we should understand the two different possible airdrops: a protocol token drop by the Arbitrum and an application token drop by popular dApps within the Arbitrum ecosystem. Participating in the ecosystem could make you eligible for both potential airdrops!

So what do we do? Well, if you're new to the ecosystem, I'd suggest following the upcoming Arbitrum Odyssey. We've seen from Optimism that simply bridging assets and becoming a repeated user has yielded the biggest rewards.

The Arbitrum Odyssey is an 8-week initiative where users try out top projects in the Arbitrum ecosystem and are awarded free-to-mint NFTs. Here's what the 8 weeks look like:

• Week 1: Bridging assets to Arbitrum with a bonus NFT to using decentralized bridge that has the most addresses bridge
• Week 2: Yield Protocol and Hashflow
• Week 3: Aboard Exchange and TofuNFT
• Week 4: Uniswap and Apex
• Week 5: 1inch and Izumi/Yin Finance
• Week 6: Dodo and Swapr
• Week 7: TreasureDAO and Battlefly

With the initiative set out to launch mid-June, many are assuming that collecting a large portion of the NFTs may be rewarded in a future airdrop.

Some other possible ways to prepare for the airdrop are to interact with popular dApps on the ecosystem that currently don't have a token. Here's a list of some popular ones:

• Across: L1-L2 bridging protocol
• Zapper: A web3 asset management platform
• Slingshot: L2 decentralized exchange
• Risk Harbor: A Web3 risk management marketplace

As always, do your own research. The airdrop isn't confirmed and there is no guarantee these methods will provide eligibility.

Not a strange world after all

After many rumors between Goblin Town and Yuga Labs, the newest rumor was the shocking resemblance between Disney's newest animated trailer of A Strange World and the Otherside.

We're talking about very similar spacecraft and passengers, worlds that look like copies of each other, and even some writing on the wall with the words "bored".  Unfortunately, the BAYC co-founder Garga quickly said that there is 0 relationship between the two brands. But how cool would that have been? Would a collaboration with Disney put Apes and NFTs mainstream?

Take a look at the tweet for yourself!

NFTs are coming to restaurants

If you thought you liked food and NFTs, think again. A ton of rich Silicon Valley tech CEOs clearly believe in membership for their fine dining experiences through SF's first NFT restaurant. Yep, you heard that right.

Using NFTs, the SHO Club will offer three membership tiers Earth, Wind, and Fire. The highest tier will give "ownership like benefits" like a once-in-a-lifetime curated trip to Japan, while lower tiers will have special menus, private lounges, and celebrity guest dinners.

And the restaurant is super fancy. I'm talking about charcoal grills, Japanese irori, and farmhouse ingredients. Fortunately for us normies, the restaurant is still open to the public who can't afford membership in this luxury dining experience.

Jokes aside, this is a really cool case of membership NFTs. A SoHo House-like experience with blockchain technology to verify and invest in your membership.

If you like learning about Web3, blockchain, NFTs, and tech, subscribe to our free newsletter! We post every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday! And if you haven't yet, follow me on Twitter!

Disclaimer: None of this is financial advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice. We are not registered investment brokers or dealers. Trading crypto-related assets are extremely risky. Please be careful and do your own research.