Quick Take

• Optimism launches its fifth airdrop.

• AltLayer supports OP Succinct.

• Puffer Finance unveils $PUFFER.

• Solidity releases v0.8.28.

Optimism Launches Airdrop 5

Optimism launched its fifth airdrop, distributing 10 million OP tokens to 54,000 unique addresses. The airdrop targeted Superchain power users, rewarding those who interacted with at least 20 different contracts across the Superchain between March 15 and September 15, 2024. Bonus multipliers were also applied for criteria such as holding a minimum amount of delegated OP, interacting with 7 different chains in the Superchain, and participating in SuperFest. To date, Optimism has distributed over 265 million OP tokens through airdrops, with approximately 550 million OP tokens still reserved for future distributions.

AltLayer Supports OP Succinct

AltLayer now supports OP Succinct, enabling seamless upgrades of OP Stack chains from optimistic to zk-rollups with minimal effort. Leveraging Succinct's SP1 prover, OP Succinct offers fast finality, sub-cent transaction fees, and reduces withdrawal delays from seven days to minutes. The implementation retains full EVM compatibility while utilizing ZKPs. The migration is simple, requiring only a single smart contract deployment and a lightweight setup, with no changes needed to existing OP Stack components. According to Succinct, its proving costs are expected to go down a further 5–10x later this year.

Puffer Finance Unveils $PUFFER

Puffer Finance, a liquid restaking infrastructure protocol, unveiled the upcoming launch of its governance token, $PUFFER, along with an airdrop. $PUFFER holders will govern key protocol parameters, including fees, limits, and security. Puffer will also feature a vote escrow mechanism, vePUFFER, which enables users to stake their $PUFFER tokens to gain voting rights. Initially, Puffer began as a liquid staking protocol with the introduction of Puffer LST and later expanded to liquid restaking and UniFi AVS. All three products will contribute fees to the Puffer treasury. Since launching in February 2024, Puffer has secured over 530,000 ETH in TVL and more than 5,000 active node operators.

Solidity v0.8.28 Release

Solidity released v0.8.28 of its compiler, featuring full support for transient storage state variables of value types. The update significantly optimizes memory usage by up to 80% and speeds up compilation in the IR pipeline by up to 25% for larger projects. It also introduces per-contract pipeline configuration, enabling more efficient selective bytecode generation for individual contracts. Solidity is the most widely used programming language for developing EVM smart contracts.

Other News

• Gauntlet launches a web app

• Base gas target is now 13 Mgas/s

• SEC charges three market makers

• Devcon.org is now on Swarm

• DBA: L1 & L2 token capture

• Rocket Pool ETH-only validators

• Delta raises $11m