Ethereum-based (ETH) layer-2 network Optimism said it has entered into a private token sale of approximately 116 million OP tokens (worth $157 million) with seven purchasers, according to a Sept. 20 update on its governance platform.
“Starting today, there will be several transactions totaling approximately 116M OP tokens,” Optimism Foundation wrote in a Sept. 21 post on X (formerly Twitter). “We’re sharing as a heads up to our community that these are planned transactions.”
Per the update, the sales were “planned,” and the seven purchasers would be subjected to a two-year lockup where they would delegate the tokens to unaffiliated third parties for participation in governance.
Optimism Foundation revealed that the tokens would come from the unallocated portion of its token treasury, adding that this is part of its original working budget of 30% of the initial OP token supply. Data from DeFillama shows that the Foundation has $1.235 billion worth of assets in its treasury.
OP falls 3%
News of the sales has negatively impacted the OP token, which has fallen by nearly 3% in the last 24 hours to $1.3397 as of press time, according to CryptoSlate’s data.
The digital asset has faced increased selling pressure lately due to the distribution of 19 million OP tokens, around $26 million, across 31,000 addresses as part of a third airdrop campaign. The layer2 network used this airdrop to reward users who delegated their tokens to support the protocol’s governance via the Optimism DAO during the first six months of the year.
In contrast, the total value of assets locked on the blockchain network rose roughly 4% during the reporting period to $2.62 billion, per data from L2beat. The data aggregator’s dashboard shows that Optimism controls around 25% of the total market share amongst Ethereum-based layer2 networks, behind only Arbitrum.
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