Hop Protocol, a cross-chain bridge meant to speed up token transfers across multiple Ethereum layer-2 scaling solutions, has announced a new governance model as well as an airdrop in which early adopters will receive 8% of the total quantity of soon-to-be-released HOP tokens.
Similar to Optimism, which recently announced a new governance structure in which early adopters will receive a 5% airdrop of the total HOP token supply. As a result, Hop Protocol is working to establish Hop DAO, a community-oriented decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) that aims to improve layer-2 scalability.
The airdrop has yet to be given an official date.
Co-founder Chris Winfrey told Cointelegraph’s Elisha Ayaw on Twitter Spaces that Hop Protocol and the Hop DAO airdrop were created with distinct concepts in mind, including governance and bridging.
Winfrey declared:
“We see Hop as core Ethereum infrastructure. It’s very important for users to be able to move their assets from one rollup to the next. For this reason, we believe Hop should be a community-owned bridge. For the users that provided a lot of liquidity, those folks got a lot more HOP, so that piece of the air drop was very plutocratic.”
The Hop Protocol’s bridging technique, according to Winfrey, is unique in that it allows the Hop team to swiftly isolate a bridge attack or network threat while minimizing user harm.
“If a catastrophic event were to happen, we can isolate the event to only the place where it’s happening and protect users. Hop uses an intermediary asset called the H token for every asset we support. Each of these H tokens is claimable on L1 for the underlying asset, and at any time you can send it back to L1 and get the underlying token,” Winfrey added.
According to Chainalysis, bridge attacks have cost the cryptocurrency industry more than $1 billion in the last year, highlighting the new technology’s serious security flaws. Perhaps the most well-known assault is the recent Axie Infinity Ronin bridge hack, in which the perpetrators stole over $600 million in digital assets in just two transactions.
Hop now enables the transfer of Ether, USD Coin, Polygon, Dai, and Tether across the Mainnet, Polygon, Optimism, Arbitrum, and xDai networks.
Rollups settle transactions outside of the main Ethereum network but return the transaction details.