Espresso Launches ESP Token With 10% Airdrop to 1M+ Addresses, Bringing Shared Sequencing to Ethereum Rollups

Espresso Foundation announced the launch of ESP, its native token, with 10% of the 3.59 billion supply allocated to a fully unlocked community airdrop targeting over one million addresses. The transition to proof-of-stake secures Espresso’s HotShot consensus network, which provides ~2-second finality for integrated rollups without replacing their existing sequencers.

Backed by a16z and Coinbase Ventures with $60 million in funding, Espresso now powers chains including RARI Chain, ApeChain, and Arbitrum Orbit deployments. The airdrop employs a novel “holder score” mechanism that rewards long-term commitment over short-term speculation.

ESP Token Goes Live: Airdrop Opens for Over One Million Addresses

On February 10, 2026, the Espresso Foundation officially unveiled the ESP token, marking the network’s transition from a permissioned testnet to a permissionless proof-of-stake blockchain . The announcement confirms what community members had anticipated for months: 10% of the total 3.59 billion ESP supply is allocated to an immediate, fully unlocked community airdrop.

The scale is striking. More than one million wallet addresses across thirty distinct participation categories are eligible, making this one of the largest initial distributions in the modular infrastructure sector. Unclaimed tokens from this first wave will roll forward into future airdrop allocations, ensuring the full 10% eventually reaches active ecosystem participants.

Ben Fisch, Espresso Systems CEO and co-founder, framed the distribution as a deliberate strategy. “The idea here is to get the token circulating among members of our extended community, but also to reward early participation and adoption of the Espresso network,” he told CoinDesk. The remaining supply is allocated to contributors, investors, future ecosystem incentives, and long-term sustainability—all subject to standard vesting schedules.

What Is Espresso? The Confirmation Layer Built Specifically for Rollups

Espresso is not a general-purpose blockchain. It does not compete with Ethereum at the execution layer, nor does it replace existing Layer 2 sequencers. Instead, it positions itself as a “confirmation layer”—a purpose-built base layer that provides fast, cryptoeconomic finality to rollups that choose to integrate it .

The distinction matters. Most rollups today rely exclusively on Ethereum for finality, which requires waiting 12 minutes or more for blocks to reach probabilistic settlement. This latency creates a structural bottleneck: applications and liquidity spread across dozens of isolated L2s cannot communicate in real time, fragmenting the user experience and forcing reliance on trust-based bridge assumptions.

Espresso inserts itself into the sequencing pipeline. A rollup’s sequencer continues to operate as normal, ordering transactions and producing blocks. Before those blocks are submitted to Ethereum L1, the sequencer publishes them to Espresso’s HotShot consensus network. HotShot validators—operators who restake ETH via EigenLayer to secure the network—reach Byzantine Fault Tolerant agreement on the block order and content within approximately two seconds .

That two-second confirmation is not a soft pre-confirmation. It carries an economic guarantee: validators who equivocate or misbehave face slashing of their restaked ETH. The rollup’s Ethereum settlement layer ultimately provides full finality, but applications and users can now treat Espresso confirmations as reliable enough for cross-chain transactions, atomic swaps, and synchronous composability.

How HotShot Achieves Two-Second Finality

The HotShot protocol is a custom BFT consensus engine optimized specifically for the confirmation layer use case . Unlike traditional BFT systems where validators both propose and agree on blocks, HotShot validators never produce blocks themselves. They receive block commitments from external sequencers and reach agreement on their ordering.

This separation of roles yields a critical property: if HotShot experiences a liveness failure, the underlying rollup sequencers continue functioning normally. The failure mode is degraded cross-chain composability, not a safety violation on the rollup itself. Validators restake ETH through EigenLayer, creating slashable economic commitments that align incentives without requiring a new native token for security bootstrapping.

The devnet has demonstrated 2-second finality with 5 MB/s throughput, and the team has publicly targeted sub-second finality by year-end 2026 .

The Business Model: Why L2s Actually Adopt Espresso

Espresso’s predecessor in the shared sequencing space, Astria, raised $18 million and shut down in December 2025. The post-mortem was instructive: Astria asked rollups to replace their existing sequencers with a shared network, effectively surrendering sequencer revenue and MEV capture. No rational L2 operator made that trade .

Espresso’s architecture reflects this lesson. The network does not replace sequencers. It sits alongside them. A rollup keeps its own sequencer, keeps its fee revenue, and keeps its MEV opportunities. What it gains is a fast, slashable confirmation from a decentralized validator set that other chains and applications can trust without needing bilateral relationships.

This “additive” value proposition has proven far more palatable. Arbitrum chains including RARI Chain, LogX, and AppChain have already integrated Espresso, with ApeChain, Plume, Syndicate, and Superposition in the pipeline . Ankr’s Rollup-as-a-Service product now offers Espresso integration as a configurable option for new L2 deployments . Polygon’s AggLayer is also collaborating with the network.

The ecosystem numbers are beginning to compound. RARI Chain’s “The Composables” NFT mint, an Espresso Foundation initiative, drove approximately $10 million in TVL growth as users bridged funds to participate. AppChain attracted over 200,000 funded wallets through allowlist incentives, while LogX processed more than $3 million in trading volume .

The Holder Score: A Novel Airdrop Mechanism

Espresso’s airdrop methodology introduces a design element worth close attention. Rather than distributing tokens via simple snapshots or linear claims, the Foundation calculates a “holder score” for each eligible address based on historical behavior following prior ecosystem airdrops .

The logic is straightforward: did users sell their tokens immediately, or did they hold, stake, or actively participate? The scoring mechanism analyzes wallet activity after receiving airdrops from projects including Caldera, Arbitrum, ApeChain, Hyperlane, Succinct, LayerZero, Uniswap, and EigenLayer. Addresses that demonstrated long-term holding intent receive proportionally higher ESP allocations.

This represents a meaningful evolution in airdrop design. Traditional distributions often reward sybil resistance and transaction volume, metrics that can be gamed. Holder score instead rewards patience and conviction—attributes the network actually values in its early participants. It also creates a reputational primitive that other protocols may eventually adopt.

Who Is Eligible?

The eligible cohort spans more than thirty distinct activities :

• 2024 mainnet registration participants
• Holders of “The Composables” NFT collection, with rewards calibrated by snapshot date and holding duration
• Developers from Build & Brew hackathons and the Brew House accelerator
• Members of the Espresso Caffeinated creator program
• Participants in the Kaito Launchpad community sale
• POAP collectors from two years of online and offline events
• Users who executed the first seamless cross-chain NFT mint between ApeChain and RARI Chain
• Partner ecosystem users from integrated rollups

The breadth of criteria reflects deliberate intent: Espresso is not merely rewarding testnet transactions but attempting to identify its genuine community across vectors of contribution.

The Sequencing Market: Espresso vs. Flashblocks

Espresso’s token launch arrives at a moment of intensified competition in the sequencing infrastructure sector. Flashbots has deployed Flashblocks on Base and Unichain, delivering 200ms “soft confirmations” directly from centralized sequencers . The contrast in approaches illuminates two distinct philosophies.

Flashblocks optimizes the existing sequencer model. It does not decentralize sequencing; it makes the centralized sequencer faster and more transparent. Users receive streaming confirmations every 200ms, but the trust assumption remains entirely with the sequencer operator. No economic slashing, no BFT consensus, no cross-chain composability guarantees.

Espresso takes the opposite trade: slower confirmations (two seconds versus 200ms) but dramatically stronger security assumptions backed by slashable restaked ETH. An Espresso confirmation can be trusted by smart contracts on other chains; a Flashblock confirmation cannot, at least not without additional trust infrastructure.

The market will likely accommodate both. Consumer applications prioritizing sub-second UX may favor Flashblocks. DeFi protocols requiring atomic cross-chain composability and liquidation safety will gravitate toward Espresso’s economic guarantees. The two products are not direct substitutes; they are different tools for different jobs.

The Vitalik Debate: Does Ethereum Still Need L2s?

Espresso’s roadmap intersects with a broader existential question now circulating in Ethereum governance. Vitalik Buterin has recently suggested that the network may eventually pivot away from its L2-centric scaling roadmap as base layer improvements—danksharding, native rollup functionality, execution sharding—reduce the structural necessity of independent execution environments .

If Ethereum itself becomes fast and cheap enough to support mainstream application deployment, does the demand for application-specific rollups persist?

Fisch’s response is measured but confident. “Layer-2s need only one thing from a layer-1, which is finality,” he told CoinDesk. “How well a layer-1 provides services to a layer-2 is measured in two things, how secure that blockchain and how fast it can provide finality.” His contention is that rollups will continue to proliferate not because Ethereum is slow, but because applications require sovereignty, customization, and economic separation that monolithic execution cannot provide.

Institutions building consumer platforms, gaming ecosystems, and regulated financial applications will not want to share execution space with memecoin speculation and MEV bots. They will launch their own chains. Those chains will need to interoperate. Espresso is betting that this thesis holds regardless of improvements to Ethereum base layer throughput.

Four Key Takeaways for the Modular Thesis

Espresso is not a shared sequencer. It is a confirmation layer. The distinction preserved L2 revenue models and enabled adoption where predecessors failed.

Restaking provides economic security without native issuance. HotShot’s security is bootstrapped from EigenLayer restakers, not ESP token emissions. This aligns incentives while preserving the token for governance and ecosystem participation.

The holder score is a genuine innovation. Rewarding long-term holding intent over short-term speculation represents a maturation of airdrop design. Future protocols will likely copy this pattern.

Speed versus security is a false binary. Flashblocks and Espresso serve different use cases. The modular thesis accommodates both.

Who Founded Espresso Systems?

Espresso Systems was founded in 2022 by Ben Fisch, who serves as CEO and is concurrently a professor at Yale University. The founding team includes Benedikt Bünz, a cryptography researcher and New York University professor specializing in zero-knowledge proofs; Jill Gunter, formerly of Slow Ventures and Goldman Sachs; and Charles Lu, a former Binance Labs team member .

The project has raised $60 million across two funding rounds, with participation from a16z Crypto, Greylock, Electric Capital, Sequoia Capital, Slow Ventures, and Coinbase Ventures . Both Arbitrum and Optimism have also invested, signaling ecosystem alignment from Ethereum’s largest L2 networks.

What Comes Next

The ESP token is now live. Staking functionality will activate alongside the permissionless proof-of-stake transition in the coming weeks. An additional 24.81% of total supply is reserved for future airdrops, grants, and community incentives, ensuring that the distribution arc extends well beyond this initial wave.

For the one million addresses now eligible, the claim window opens immediately. For the broader modular ecosystem, the signal is clear: shared confirmation infrastructure has transitioned from academic research to live economic mainnet. The sequencer wars have entered their next phase—not as a battle between competing replacements, but as a coexistence of specialized layers serving distinct user needs.

The fragmentation that defined Ethereum’s rollup-centric roadmap was never an accident; it was an inevitable consequence of scaling heterogeneous execution environments. Espresso’s thesis is that this fragmentation need not imply isolation. With fast, slashable confirmations and cross-chain composability, the islands can be bridged without sacrificing sovereignty. The token launch transforms that thesis from architectural vision to cryptoeconomic reality.