According to Cointelegraph, Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution Optimism has announced plans to sell 116 million OP tokens to seven private buyers for treasury management purposes. The sale, valued at $159 million at current prices, is not expected to have a significant impact on the price of OP tokens, as it is a private sale and the tokens are sourced from the unallocated portion of the OP token treasury.

The tokens are subject to a two-year lock-up period, during which buyers cannot sell them on secondary markets. However, they have been granted permission to delegate the tokens to unaffiliated third parties for governance purposes. Optimism states that this sale is part of its original plan and is accounted for in its 'original working budget of 30% of the initial token supply.'

This announcement comes just two days after Optimism revealed its third airdrop, in which 19.4 million OP tokens were allocated to over 31,000 addresses participating in delegation activities related to the network's decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), Optimism Collective. Optimism, Polygon, and Arbitrum are among the most heavily used layer-2 scaling solutions in the industry. Despite trailing behind Arbitrum in terms of total value locked (TVL), Optimism saw its total transactions surpass that of Arbitrum in August, driven largely by a surge in activity from Coinbase's sandbox and the identity verification project Worldcoin.