Optimism Foundation announces private sale of 19.5 million OP tokens

The Optimism Foundation has announced it entered a private sale for approximately 19.5 million OP tokens. OP is the native governance token of the Optimism L2 blockchain.

According to an announcement, the OP tokens currently worth about $89 million will be moved in coming days.

“Over the next few days, there will be several transactions to send the OP. These are all planned transactions and we’re sharing a heads up to keep the community informed,” the Optimism Foundation noted.

Optimism also shared this announcement on its official X account, noting that the movement of the OP tokens from its wallets are “planned transactions.”

Optimism hasn’t disclosed the terms of the private sale or the purchaser. However, it added that the tokens have a two-year lock-up period. The purchaser will nonetheless be able to participate in governance by delegating their locked OP tokens to unaffiliated third parties.

Also notably, these OP tokens are from the “Unallocated portion of the OP Token treasury.” The Foundation said the tokens are part of its original working budget that accounted for 30% of Optimism’s initial OP token supply.

OP’s circulating supply is currently at 1,006,141,600, accounting for 23.43% of the total supply.

According to data from CoinMarketCap, the OP token price hovered around $4.56 at the time of writing, largely flat in the past 24 hours. Trading volume was down 34% to about $418 million.