Optimism (OP) Price Jumps Nearly 20% as Unichain Moves to OP Enterprise

OP, the native token of Optimism, climbed nearly 20% at one point in the last 24 hours after Uniswap announced that Unichain will hand its production operations to OP Enterprise.

The rally came as Bitcoin and several major altcoins faced renewed selling pressure, giving OP a rare boost.

Unichain Handover Sends OP Higher

CoinGecko reported in a post on October 14 a 19.4% daily gain for OP that took it to $0.1621, linking the move to Uniswap’s announcement that Unichain would transition to OP Enterprise.

However, at the time of writing, it had given up some of those gains and was trading at around $0.156, still a 14% jump in 24 hours and 28% in seven days. It also gained 64% in 30 days but remains down nearly 68% from a year ago.

Trading activity also rose alongside the price. OP recorded around $226 million in 24-hour volume, a 128% increase from the previous day. The last time the token went higher than it did today was in mid-May when it touched $0.166.

Uniswap’s October 9 announcement explained that Unichain’s testnet migration was scheduled for October 13, with mainnet migration set for October 29. The transition leaves Unichain’s chain ID, contracts, balances, and existing Uniswap v2, v3, and v4 deployments unchanged.

Under the arrangement, Optimism will operate the production infrastructure, including sequencers, remote procedure call services, monitoring, and incident response across mainnet and testnet. Unichain users are not expected to face changes to their existing experience.

The handover also prepares Unichain for native interoperability across the OP Stack. Once that functionality goes live, users will be able to transfer assets, starting with ETH, between Unichain and other OP Stack networks without relying on a bridge.

OP Rallies as Wider Market Struggles

The price move stands out against the conditions reported by CryptoPotato yesterday. Several major altcoins lost ground, with NEAR falling roughly 10%, Zcash dropping more than 6%, and both Cardano and Hyperliquid shedding around 5%. Ethereum also briefly dipped to $2,400 before recovering above $2,500.

Zcash seems to have turned things around, recouping more than 4% in the last 24 hours to go above $1,250, while NEAR dumped another 4% and was hovering just above $5 at the time of writing.

Meanwhile, Bitcoin had fallen as low as $80,850 before rebounding toward $84,000, while daily liquidations across crypto markets exceeded $800 million.