Optimism (OP) Continues Market Recovery As Network Whales Triple Holdings

Ethereum layer 2 network Optimism (OP) has maintained its market recovery in the last few days, recording a 5.57% gain over the last 24 hours, based on data from CoinMarketCap.

Since hitting the $1.31 price mark, Optimism has embarked on an upward curve, looking set to return to the high price levels seen at the start of August.

Among many positives for Optimism, the on-chain analytics firm, Santiment has also revealed another significant development for the altcoin in terms of investors’ interest.

Related Reading: Optimism (OP) Rides The Wave Of Today’s Crypto Surge With 15% Rally

According to a report by Santiment on August 21, whale and shark addresses on Optimism holding between 100,000-10,000,000 OP have consistently increased their amount of holdings over the last 12 months.

#Optimism is seeing some positive signs today, as its +5% pump is accompanied by 22.9K active addresses, among its best days of 2023. Additionally, key whale & shark addresses with 100K-10M $OP continue holding a high level, currently worth $781.9M. https://t.co/VOE7uqOQpN pic.twitter.com/Ie0oX2pJT0

— Santiment (@santimentfeed) August 21, 2023

The analytics team reported that these investors currently hold 505.91 million OP worth around $781.9 million. Remarkably, this stake constitutes a significant 69.6% of Optimism’s total market shares.

In addition to this investment growth, Santiment also noted that Optimism recorded 22,900 active addresses on Monday, its fifth-highest value of their metric in 2023. 

In line with Santiment’s report on the increasing OP accumulation by Optimism major investors, Spot On Chain, another blockchain analytics platform, has recently provided a deeper insight into this trend.

According to a blog post by Spot On Chain, address 0x011, which they suspect belongs to popular venture capital firm Amber Group, has purchased 3.73 million OP – valued at $5.71 million – from Binance in the last 24 hours. 

The analytics team states that this particular address has accumulated 8.14 million OP, valued at $12.7 million over the last 19 days. 

Interestingly, Spot On Chain proposes that the reason behind OP’s recent accumulation could be the upcoming Ethereum Cancun/Deneb upgrade.

Related Reading: Altcoin Season In Limbo As Bitcoin Dominance Bounces Off Key Support

In June, Christine Kim, vice president of Galaxy Digital’s research team, stated that this impending Ethereum network upgrade – slated for the second half of 2023 – could boost the network capacity of layer two solutions such as Arbitrum and Optimism by 100-fold.

At the time of writing, Optimism is trading at $1.56, with a 0.29% decline in the last hour. Albeit, the token’s trading volume is up 54.83% in the last 24 hours and is valued at $137.08 million.