Optimism OP token slips 10% in week ahead of $30M token unlock

The price of Optimism’s native OP token is leading losses among the top 50 cryptocurrencies, falling as far as 10% on the week ahead of a $30 million token unlock.

According to data from tokenomics platform Token Unlocks, 24.16 million OP tokens, which account for roughly 3% of the circulating supply — are scheduled to be unlocked on Sept. 30.

At current prices, the unlock will see a little more than $30 million worth of OP tokens hit the market, with $15.49 million going to core contributors and $14.26 million set aside for investors.

Token unlocking events form a core part of many main cryptocurrency projects, with many teams choosing to gradually release tokens to the market instead of unleashing them all at once. Typically however, unlocking events are viewed by investors as likely to put pressure on prices, as a new supply of tokens becomes available for sale.

The price of the OP token is currently trading flat on the day at $1.26, after experiencing a brief 3% rally in the past 5 hours, according to price data from CoinGecko.

Related: Optimism transactions surpass Arbitrum, but what’s behind the uptick in users?

Last week on Sept. 21, Optimism revealed that it would be selling $160 million worth of the OP token to private sellers as part of a planned sale.

Starting today, there will be several transactions totaling approximately 116M OP tokens. We’re sharing as a heads up to our community that these are planned transactions.

— Optimism (✨_✨) (@optimismFND) September 20, 2023

On Sept. 19, Optimism announced its third airdrop, where 19.4 million OP tokens were allocated to more than 31,000 addresses that took part in delegation activities relating to the network’s decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), Optimism Collective.

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