Cody McGrath 
The governance token of the HOP Protocol declines in value on launch on Friday, as traders seemed to be abandoning the token after it was airdropped.
With approximately 12,000 addresses claiming the airdrop, the Ethereum Layer-2 protocol launched an airdrop for users. About 20 million HOP tokens have been claimed, accounting for approximately 37.51% of the total supply.
But traders appear to be selling the token in large quantities. The price of HOP has decreased by over 27% in the last 24 hours, to $0.15. Trading volumes were around $6.4 million.
HOP’s tumble is similar to that of Ethereum Layer 2 Optimism, whose OP token dropped by over 66% in debut this week.
HOP to connect users across blockchain
HOP DAO currently supports stablecoins like DAI, USDC, and USDT. It enables users to transfer tokens across Ethereum Layer-2 chains. The protocol supports Gnosis and Polygon as mainnet rollups. They also intend to lend their support to Optimism and Arbitirum.
145,329 registered customers can claim the total airdrop supply of roughly 55 million.
The token will be used as the HOP Protocol DAO’s governance token.
The majority of the airdrop supply about 3% of the overall supply, will go to wallets that have a minimum of two bridge transactions. The bridging transactions must be worth at least $1,000 to make the user qualified for the airdrop,
According to reports, some users took advantage of the airdrop by performing multiple bridge transactions.
HOP launch crash trails another major Ethereum L2 airdrop
HOP’s airdrop follows another huge launch earlier this month, Optimism. OP was also sold heavily at launch and it had a fair share of hacks and exploits.
Despite this, the Optimism hacker turned out to be a whitehat and promised to return 18 million tokens. They’d also transferred over 1 million OP to Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum.
Nevertheless, the airdrops come amid a severe dip in the cryptocurrency market. This year, Bitcoin and most major altcoins have plummeted substantially.