Optimism dropped by 10% in the week leading up to the scheduled token unlock, which will see 24 million OP tokens released to the market.
The price of Optimism’s native OP token, which leads the top 50 cryptocurrencies, fell by as much as 10% in the week ahead of the $30 million token unlock.
According to data from the token economics platform Token Unlocks, 24.16 million OP tokens are expected to be unlocked on September 30, accounting for approximately 3% of the circulating supply.
At current prices, just over $30 million worth of OP tokens will be put on the market once unlocked, of which $15.49 million will go to core contributors and $14.26 million will be reserved for investors.
Token unlock events are a core part of many major cryptocurrency projects, with many teams choosing to gradually release tokens to the market rather than releasing them all at once. However, investors often believe that unlocking events can put pressure on prices because there is a new supply of tokens available for sale.
The price of the OP token is currently flat at $1.26 after experiencing a brief 3% rise in the past 5 hours, according to price data from CoinGecko.
Last week on September 21, Optimism revealed that it would be selling $160 million worth of OP tokens to private sellers as part of a planned sale.
On September 19, Optimism announced its third airdrop, in which 19.4 million OP tokens were distributed to more than 31,000 addresses participating in delegation activities related to the network’s decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) Optimism Collective.
