Optimism Foundation Completes Multi-Million Dollar Token Sale
The Optimism Foundation recently conducted a private token sale, where they sold approximately 19.5 million OP tokens, equivalent to roughly $90 million, to an undisclosed buyer.
The Foundation explained that these tokens were sourced from the Unallocated portion of the OP Token treasury, forming part of the Foundation’s original working budget, which comprised 30% of the initial OP token supply.
Buyers of these tokens will be subject to a two-year lockup period, during which they can delegate them to third parties for governance participation.
In a social media post on March 7th, on platform X (previously known as Twitter), the Foundation informed its community about several “planned transactions” originating from its wallet. They provided an advance notice to their community regarding these transactions.
Starting today and over the coming days, there will be several transactions from Optimism controlled wallets totaling approximately 25M OP tokens. We’re sharing as a heads up to our community that these are planned transactions.
— Optimism (@Optimism) March 7, 2024
This action resembles a similar move made by the Foundation in September 2023, when they announced private sales of 116 million tokens, valued at around $157 million, to seven entities.
Optimism, the second-largest Ethereum-based layer2 network, holds approximately 24% of the market share, according to L2beat data. The network’s total value locked stands at approximately $9 billion currently, lagging behind Arbitrum’s $16 billion.
READ MORE: El Salvador’s Bitcoin Holdings Surpass $150 Million
Despite recent news of the sell-off, OP’s price has shown remarkable resilience in recent months amidst a broader market surge that propelled Bitcoin and Ethereum prices to new peaks.
Over the past week, the layer-2 network’s token reached a new all-time high of $4.86 on March 6th, marking an increase of more than 115% over the past year, with gains of over 20.9% in the last seven days and 36.38% in the past month. However, its price has slightly retraced to $4.60 at the time of writing.
Meanwhile, OP faces significant selling pressure ahead as the network is scheduled to unlock 24.16 million tokens, valued at approximately $110.65 million, by March 29th.
Alexander Stefanov
Reporter at CoinsPress
Alex is Editor-in-Chief of Coinspress and co-founder of Millennial Media Group, with nearly a decade of experience covering financial markets - crypto first, then everything else. It started in 2016 with Bitcoin. Like most people at the time, he didn't fully understand it - so he kept digging. Blockchain, tokenomics, the projects, the cycles. That curiosity never stopped, and eventually pulled him into traditional markets too: equities, commodities, macro. Not because he left crypto behind, but because you can't properly understand one without the other. What drives him is straightforward: he wants to know why something is happening, not just that it's happening. Most market coverage stops at the headline - price up, price down, here's a chart. Alex finds that kind of reporting actively unhelpful. If you walk away from an article without understanding the mechanism behind the move, what did you actually learn? He holds a degree in Tourism from New Bulgarian University - not the most obvious path into financial markets, but markets have a way of pulling in people who are simply too curious to stay out. He has authored over 200 in-depth analyses and more than 10,000 articles across crypto and traditional finance. He still thinks every day in markets teaches him something new. That's probably why he hasn't stopped.
