Hop Protocol, a cross-chain bridge designed to facilitate fast transfers of tokens between different Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solutions, has launched a new governance model as well as an airdrop where early adopters will receive HOP which will soon be released 8% of the total token supply.
Similar to Optimism, which recently introduced a new governance structure where early users will airdrop 5% of the total supply of OP tokens - Hop Protocol aims to create a community-oriented governance model called Hop DAO, which aims to Helps with Layer -2 scalability.
An official date for the airdrop has not yet been announced.
Co-founder Chris Winfrey told Cointelegraph’s Elisha Ayaw on Twitter Spaces that the Hop Protocol and Hop DAO airdrops were designed with unique models for governance and bridges in mind.
“We see Hop as the core infrastructure of Ethereum. It is very important for users to be able to transfer their assets from one rollup to the next. Therefore, we believe that Hop should be a community-owned bridge,” Winfrey said.
Talking about the structure of the airdrop, Winfrey said, “The goal of designing the airdrop is to … make sure you know the early liquidity providers are getting rewarded”
“For users who provide a lot of liquidity, those people get more HOP, so the part of the airdrop is very rich,” Winfrey continued.
Winfrey pointed out that the Hop protocol bridge mechanism is unique and allows the Hop team to quickly isolate bridge attacks or network threats with minimal harm to users.
"In the event of a catastrophic event, we can isolate the event to just where it occurred and protect users."
“Hop uses an intermediary asset called an H token for every asset we support. Each H token can be claimed on L1 as a base asset, and at any time it can be sent back to L1 and acquired. base token,” Winfrey added.
Bridge hacks have cost the cryptocurrency industry more than $1 billion over the past year, according to data compiled by Chainalysis, highlighting major security gaps in the new technology. The recent Axie Infinity Ronin bridge hack is perhaps the most notorious, with attackers stealing over $600 million worth of digital assets in just two transactions.
Currently, Hop supports transferring ETH, USDC, MATIC, DAI, and USDT from the following networks: Mainnet, Polygon, Optimism, Arbitrum, and xDai.
Rollup settles transactions outside of the Ethereum main network, but publishes transaction data back to the Ethereum network.