The Ethereum scaling protocol’s Optimism tokens, valued at more than $587 million, are set to hit the open market on Tuesday as part of a scheduled unlock event. Consequently, there has been a 7% drop in the price of OP tokens.
Following token unlocking, owners are free to sell or trade their tokens as they see appropriate. Early donors and investors now have approximately 386 million Optimism tokens. The OP circulation supply, which as of Tuesday morning was 335 million tokens, will almost quadruple with the forthcoming unlock.
Early investors have probably made considerable profits, thus their desire to take advantage of these gains might significantly increase selling pressure. As a consequence, there is less than $10 million in immediate liquidity for OP token pairings on both controlled and decentralized exchanges. Notably, on Binance, a single sell order of $600,000 has the power to lower prices by an extra 2%.
This unlocking event takes place at the same time as OP token prices have generally fallen since February of this year. During this time, increases of at least 50% were seen in ether (ETH) and bitcoin (BTC), while OP tokens have trended down, falling from $3 to $1.5.
The market’s expectation is increased by the introduction of such a large number of Optimism tokens. Market players will carefully watch events and subsequent trading activity since it is unclear how this increase in supply will affect OP token values.
Market watchers and players alike will be intently monitoring the future direction of OP token values as the market adapts to the increased circulating supply and anticipated selling pressure.
