Optimism is buckled up to release more than 386 million OP tokens on May 31. It’s more than doubling the total circulating supply and is expected to garner a fabulous response from the community.
Optimism tokens (OP) worth $587 million are slated to hit the crypto markets on May 31. It is aimed to expedite the sales of the tokens as the initial vesting period is coming to an end. But at the same time, it is one of the biggest unlocking events of the year which would prompt concerns about downward price pressure.
The firm is expecting a sharp increase of 100% with this unlocking event. They are hoping that the circulating supply of just 335 million OP tokens gets totally exhausted. Token Terminal tweeted about the event and informed of the details. The tweet informed that at the current token price, the potential selling pressure is $600m. It also says that this unlocking of the 9% of the total supply is particularly meant for investors and core contributors.
As per the analysis published by Unlock Calendar, a token unlock research firm, the unlock event could pave the way for significant sales for OP tokens. Mostly, it happened due to the early-stage investors accumulating the assets. Optimism’s large seed investment is already backed by some big venture capital firms including IDEO CoLab Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), and Paradigm.
As per the reports released by CryptoRank, Paradigm, and IDEO have more than 10000% on their initial investment. However, the usual buy-in price for venture capital firms is $0.24. It means that the investors in Optimism are already at a 529% gain.
Token unlocks are scheduled events that release the tokens that are locked for early-stage investors and major contributors for a certain period of time. This type of event is conducted to rule out large asset sales in times of low liquidity. At the same time, it could have an impact on the price of the tokens too.
The OP token represents the Optimism blockchain and gives its governance abilities to the holders. And Optimism has introduced itself as a layer-2 scaling solution that comes with multiple merits. It aims to make the transactions on the Ethereum network cheaper, faster, and more efficient.
On June 1, 2023, Optimism rolled out its first airdrop. The event was a major success with the delivery of OP tokens to 250,000 addresses. On Feb 2, 2023, the second airdrop was launched. It reached an even higher number of 11 million OP tokens to a whopping 307,000 unique addresses.
However, the OP token has been seeing a downtrend lately despite the successful airdrop campaigns. It also suffered a short-term hit just before the unlocking event. It slumped down to $1.51 with a decrease rate of 8.5% in 24 hours duration.
CoinGecko released the data that showed how the price of OP is scaled down to 53% from seeing an all-time high of $3.54.
