GetBlock Magazine - What happened? Venture fund Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) purchased $90 million worth of Optimism (OP) blockchain governance tokens in a private transaction, Unchained Crypto reports, citing anonymous sources. According to the terms of the deal, the assets were placed on hold for a period of two years; during this period they cannot be sold on the market.
Unchained Crypto material
What else is known? The NGO Optimism Foundation announced a deal for a similar amount in early March, without disclosing the investor. Then it was also reported that the coins would be locked for two years, and the buyer would be able to delegate them to unaffiliated third parties to participate in voting on the development of the project.
Analyst Colin Wu later reported that the March closed sale of $89 million in OP tokens to six private investors was the largest funding round of the month.
The a16z deal comes amid increased activity in the Optimism ecosystem, as well as the growing popularity of OP Stack, an open-source tool that allows developers to create layer-2 (L2) blockchains.
OP Stack was used by the American crypto exchange Coinbase (NASDAQ:COIN) to create Base, and the Aevo network and other projects were also built on it. Recently, Celo blockchain developers also chose this tool to create their own L2 network.
The OP token ranks 42nd in the cryptocurrency rankings by market capitalization with $2.7 billion and is trading at $2.53, having gained 6.7% per day. At the same time, since the beginning of the year the decline was 31%.
After the Dencun hard fork in the Ethereum blockchain, commissions in networks based on it showed a significant drop. The leader was Optimism, where the cost of transactions decreased by 99%, amounting to less than $0.001.
