Optimism (OP) Becomes the Focus of Whale Investors

Ethereum Layer 2 network Optimism (OP) has continued its market recovery over the past few days, posting a 5.57% gain in the last 24 hours, according to data from CoinMarketCap. Whale and shark addresses, with between 100,000-10,000,000 OPs on Optimism, have steadily increased their holdings over the past 12 months, according to a report from on-chain analytics firm Santiment. It was stated that these investors hold 505.91 million OPs worth approximately $781.9 million, which makes up 69.6% of Optimism’s total market share. Additionally, Santiment noted that Optimism registered 22,900 active addresses on Monday, the fifth-highest for its metric in 2023. Spot On Chain, a blockchain analytics platform, recently provided a deeper understanding of this trend.

According to Spot On Chain’s blog post, address 0x011, suspected to be owned by popular venture capital firm Amber Group, has purchased 3.73 million OPs worth $5.71 million from Binance in the past 24 hours. It is stated that this particular address has accumulated 8.14 million OPs worth $12.7 million in the last 19 days.

Spot On Chain suggests that the OP’s recent backlog may be the reason behind the upcoming Ethereum Cancun/Deneb upgrade. In June, Christine Kim, vice president of Galaxy Digital’s research team, stated that this upcoming Ethereum network upgrade, scheduled for the second half of 2023, could increase the network capacity of Arbitrum and Optimism Layer 2 solutions by 100 times.