Optimism Tokens Worth $36M to Be Unlocked on Sunday; OP Slides 3.5%

Layer-2 blockchain Optimism is set to unlock $36 million worth of tokens on Sunday, with the anticipated increase in supply spurring a 3.5% slump in the price of the blockchain’s native OP token on Tuesday.

The previous token unlock on June 30 resulted in a 10.7% sell-off across all OP trading pairs, although the token rebounded by more than 15% over the following 24 hours.

This time, the unlock equates to 3.56% of optimism’s circulating supply, with $19 million being allocated to core contributors and $17 million to investors, according to token.unlocks.

On optimism’s most liquid market, Binance, 2% market depth is currently hovering at around $600,000 on both buy and sell sides, meaning that a market order of that magnitude would move the price by 2% on the exchange.

In spite of short-term volatility, the optimism token has marked a 67% gain since the turn of the year following a series of integrations with the likes of Worldcoin and Coinbase’s Base protocol, with both companies using Optimism’s OP stack for development purposes.

Optimism is currently trading at $1.50 with a market cap of over $1 billion. Circulating supply remains at just 16% as token unlocks are scheduled incrementally until August, 2027.