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Optimism to Unlock $56M in Tokens Today, OP Slips 2%
Key points
- Optimism will unlock over 31 million OP tokens in the next few hours.
- The previous unlock caused a temporary drop in prices, but they recovered slightly within a week.
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Ethereum’s Layer 2 Blockchain Optimism is set to unlock $56 million worth of OP tokens today. Ahead of the expected supply increase, OP’s price has dropped 2% to $1.76 over the past 24 hours, CoinGecko data shows.
Second data from Token Unlocks, Optimism’s upcoming unlock will distribute over 31 million OP tokens, equivalent to nearly 3% of the circulating supply, to the project’s investors and top contributors. The project has unlocked approximately 1.13 billion tokens so far, representing over 26% of its total supply.
At current prices, the unlock will see over $56 million worth of OP tokens released into the market, with $30 million going to primary contributors and $26 million set aside for investors.
The token release is part of a larger strategy among crypto projects, in which tokens are gradually made available to prevent flooding of the market. Overall, such events can create uncertainty in the market as more tokens become available, potentially impacting the price.
The previous unlock of the Optimism token on May 31st resulted in a slight decline across all OP trading pairs, although the price recovered slightly by more than 2% the following week, according to CoinGecko.
Earlier this month, OP Labs, the development team behind Optimism, announced the launch of permissionless proof-of-concept on the Optimism mainnet, a major milestone for the project as it moves closer to its goal of a decentralized network.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin refers to permissionless failure testing as “Phase 1.” These proofs allow for the safe withdrawal of ETH and ERC-20 tokens without relying on any centralized authority. Additionally, any user can dispute and remove invalid withdrawals and earn a reward for doing so.
“Launching proof-of-concepts on OP Mainnet… and achieving Phase 1 decentralization are important milestones, but the bottom line is Phase 2 decentralization,” Optimism said.
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