Optimism, an Ethereum L2 scaling solution, today announced that it plans to sell 116 million OP tokens to seven private customers for a price of around $159 million. The private sale will be done for treasury management purposes, and it comes on the heels of Optimism’s third airdrop announced on Monday, which distributed 19.4 million OP tokens.
A week of cashing in on OP token
These OP tokens will be part of the unallocated supply in the OP token treasury and will be subject to a lock-up period of two years. As a result, buyers can’t resell them on the secondary market. However, they can delegate them to other parties for corporate governance. The private nature of the token sale makes it unlikely that OP’s value will be significantly affected by the transaction.
Token buyers are authorised to assign governance responsibilities to non-affiliated third parties. Optimism says that the funds from this sale are already allotted within its original working budget of 30% of the initial token supply.
On Monday, Optimism announced a third airdrop in which 31,870 addresses who participated in the Optimism Collective’s delegation operations will get 19.4 million OP tokens, with an estimated value of $26 million. Tokens for Airdrop 3 are automatically distributed to participating wallets without requiring users to complete any further actions.
The goal of the airdrop was to increase engagement on the site by giving users free tokens. Each user will receive a payout proportional to the quantity of tokens delegated and the length of time those tokens were kept. In addition, addresses whose delegates participated in the Optimism Governance vote receive a bonus. Optimism plans to airdrop 19% of its initial token supply, in keeping with its emphasis on community-driven growth.