The foundation behind the Layer 2 blockchain said the sale of 116 million OP tokens was for “treasury management purposes.”

Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solution Optimism has sold $157 million worth of OP tokens through a private sale, split among seven different purchasers.

In a governance post on Wednesday, the foundation behind Optimism said the 116 million OP tokens were sold for treasury management purposes and would be subject to a two-year lockup.

You can check out this post on the Optimism Governance forum for more details: https://t.co/USVRsrL2XM

— Optimism (✨🔴_🔴✨) (@optimismFND) September 20, 2023

“The tokens come from the Unallocated portion of the OP Token treasury, and are part of the Foundation’s original working budget of 30% of the initial OP token supply,” said a member of the Optimism foundation.

According to data from DeFiLlama, more than $1.23 billion still remains in Optimism’s Treasury.

Although there are currently no details as to who the seven purchasers in question are, they will be able to delegate the tokens in their possession to unaffiliated third parties for participation in governance.

Bobby Dresser, the general manager at the Optimism Foundation, said the process for the token holders to select delegates would be left up to them, as is the case with all OP token holders in the network’s decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), dubbed the Optimism Collective. Dresser also described the token sale as a “planned event.” 

The token sale announcement comes two days after Optimism announced its third airdrop, which saw 31,000 unique addresses allocated 19.4 million OP tokens.

With $2.63 billion in Total Value Locked (TVL), Optimism is the second-largest Layer 2 network and accounts for 25% of the market, data from L2 Beat shows.