Wintermute moves over $4M of Optimism tokens to Binance ahead of OP unlock

Decentralized finance (DeFi) platform Wintermute has transferred its Optimism (OP) tokens to a Binance exchange wallet ahead of the upcoming unlock that’s scheduled to release $587 million worth of tokens into the market.

On May 31, 386 million OP tokens will be unlocked for early contributors and investors. The amount of tokens that will be released into the market accounts for 9% of the total supply. The tokens are worth around $587 million and are expected to increase the circulating supply by over 100%.

Seemingly preparing for the token unlock, Wintermute’s wallet has transferred 2.651 million OP — worth $4.31 million — to Binance in the past two days. According to the on-chain analytics platform Spot on Chain, the DeFi platform and crypto market maker has already sold the tokens for $1.63 per OP.

Over the past 42 hours, @wintermute_t has moved 2.651M $OP to #Binance at $1.63 on avg ($4.31M).

⚠️ 386.5M $OP ($587.5M) will be unlocked in 18 hours:
– 204M $OP to core contributors
– 182.5M $OP to investors
– Represents 9% of total supply or 53.5% of circulating supply pic.twitter.com/XLSkeaEqHp

— Spot On Chain (@spotonchain) May 30, 2023

The company accumulated a total of 21.31 million OP tokens from crypto exchanges Binance and Coinbase at an average price of $1.01. Wintermute has already sold 5.9 million tokens for $10.6 million and still holds 15.37 million OP, worth around $23.4 million at the time of writing.

In 2022, the Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution Optimism raised $150 million in a Series B round led by Andreessen Horowitz and Paradigm and saved $1 billion in fees for Ethereum users. According to Crunchbase, Wintermute was one of the investors who participated in this round.

Meanwhile, Optimism is set for a major upgrade on June 6. On May 16, Optimism announced the date for its “Bedrock” upgrade, which is expected to reduce transaction fees and enhance its compatibility with the Ethereum network.

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