Wintermute Prepares For 2023’s Biggest OP Tokens Unlock Event

Key Points:

• Wintermute has transferred 2,651 million OPs to Binance at an average price of $1.63 in the last 42 hours.
• Wintermute is a round B investor in Optimism.
• Unlocking Optimism is likely to cause substantial selling pressure on the OP token.

As Coincu reported, OP tokens worth more than $587 million of Ethereum scaling protocol Optimism are expected to be released into the open market on Tuesday as part of a planned to-unlock strategy, prompting companies and organizations holding OP to have a backup plan in place, including Wintermute.

According to Spot On Chain monitoring, in the past 42 hours, Wintermute has transferred 2,651 million OPs to Binance, with an average price of $1.63 (a total of $4.31 million). It is reported that Wintermute is one of Optimism’s round B investors. The company’s activity is showing preparation before the upcoming OP token unlocks event.

Early contributors and investors now have 386.5 million optimism tokens, and the move would roughly increase OP’s circulation supply, which stands at 335 million tokens. This OP token unlock will be the biggest token unlock this year.

Token unlocks are scheduled events where tokens are allocated to early-stage investors, and key development contributors are “released” after being frozen for a certain period of time. Cryptocurrency projects often ensure that tokens are “locked in” to avoid large asset sales during periods of low liquidity, an event that can significantly impact prices.

Optimism is a layer 2 scaling solution that aims to make transactions and operations on the Ethereum network faster, cheaper, and more efficient. OP is the governance token of the Optimism network.

It is highly likely that unlocking Optimism could create some significant selling pressure on OP tokens, largely because early-stage investors are reaping sizable returns.

Optimism’s biggest seed investors include Crypto hedge funds Paradigm, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), and IDEO CoLab Ventures. According to data from CryptoRank, investors participating in the Seed round (Paradigm and IDEO) are currently returning 10,000% more than their initial investment. However, for now, only Wintermute is making the most obvious move.

DISCLAIMER: The information on this website is provided as general market commentary and does not constitute investment advice. We encourage you to do your own research before investing.

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Harold

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