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 what lies ahead, Wintermute’s wallet has been spotted transferring 2.651 million OP – worth $4.31 million – to Binance in the past 2 days. According to the on-chain analytics platform Spot on Chain, the DeFi protocol 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
According to the analytics platform, the company accumulated a total of 21.31M from crypto exchanges Binance and Coinbase at an average price of $1.01. At the moment, the platform has already sold 5.9 million tokens for a total of $10.6 million. The DeFi platform still holds a total of 15.37 million OP, which is worth around $23.4 million at the time of writing.
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Last year, the Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution Optimism raised $150 million in a Series B round, led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and Paradigm, as it saved $1 billion in fees for Ethereum users. According to Crunchbase, Wintermute was one of the investors who participated in this round.
Meanwhile, the platform is set to go through a major upgrade on June 6. On May 16, Optimism announced the date for its “Bedrock” upgrade that’s expected to reduce transaction fees and enhance its compatibility with the Ethereum network.
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