More than 386 million Optimism (OP) tokens - worth $587 million at current prices - are scheduled to be unlocked on May 31st as part of the initial distribution phase for early contributors and investors, raising concerns about price pressure.
Unlocking OP on May 31st is one of the largest scheduled unlocking events this year. With the current circulating supply only at 335 million OP, tomorrow's event could increase the circulating supply by over 100%.
According to analysis from the token unlocking research firm Unlock Calendar, it is reasonable to expect that the unlocking of Optimism will create significant selling pressure on the original OP token, primarily from early-stage investors who have earned substantial profits.
The largest seed investors in Optimism include cryptocurrency venture capital firms Paradigm, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), and IDEO CoLab Ventures. According to data from CryptoRank, the participating investors in the Seed round - Paradigm and IDEO - are currently making profits of over 10,000% compared to their initial investments.
However, it appears that the average purchase price for the venture capital firms is around $0.24, meaning that they are currently experiencing a combined increase of 529%.
Token unlocking events are scheduled events in which tokens are allocated to early-stage investors and key development contributors are "released" after being locked for a certain period of time. Cryptocurrency projects typically ensure that tokens are "locked" to avoid mass sell-offs during periods of low liquidity, which can significantly impact prices negatively.
Optimism is a layer 2 scaling solution designed to make transactions and operations on the Ethereum network faster, cheaper, and more efficient. OP is the governance token of the Optimism network.
On June 1st of last year, Optimism conducted its first airdrop, distributing OP to nearly 250,000 addresses belonging to early network users. On February 9th, 2023, the second major airdrop took place, distributing over 11 million OP to 307,000 unique addresses.
While the airdrop events caused a surge in transaction activity in the short term, the price of OP has generally been on a downward trend over the past few months.
OP is currently trading at $1.52 after a nearly 10% drop in the past day. The token has decreased by 53% from its all-time high of $3.54, which it reached on February 24th, 2023.
