Optimism transfers 546.9 million OPs from user airdrops to corporate funds

The governance vote on the Optimism (OP) network ended on August 20, and the results surprised most people.

A proposal to strip 546.9 million OPs from user airdrop distribution and transfer them to the foundation's controlled fund was approved in the last few minutes thanks to a single large vote from a team funded by the foundation itself.

The reversal mechanism is straightforward. The proposal remained rejected for most of the voting window. With 16 minutes and 52 seconds left before the end of the voting, a entrusted representative named Test in Prod cast 8.486 million votes in favor of OP. This caused the approval rate to jump from 45.77% to 61.84%, ensuring the passage of the proposal. Without this vote, the final approval rate would be only 46.47%, the proposal would be rejected, and the tokens would continue to remain in the user airdrop pool. The final statistical results are: 17.974 million OPs in favor and 10.931 million OPs in opposition.

Test in Prod's data on Optimism governance platform Agora shows that it is the core development team of Optimism Collective. In its 2025 Security Council nomination document, the team disclosed that its funding was entirely provided by Collective. The team received a new 12-month term on the Optimism Security Council in June 2026. The voting rights for this proposal are locked based on a snapshot of the block height of 155,526,433 on August 13, one week before the end of the voting. OPs acquired or delegated after the block have no impact on voting results. After the vote, multiple users pointed to other Optimism team address clusters on social media, suggesting that there might be broader coordinated voting behavior.

The foundation controls allocations worth US$49.7 million.

The approved proposal re-designates 546.9 million OPs (12.7% of total supply) as strategic ecosystem funds, managed by the Optimism Foundation. Based on the OP's price of approximately US$0.09 at the time of the vote, the tokens were worth approximately US$49.7 million, close to a quarter of the OP's total market value of approximately US$214 million. The fund will be used to pay for collaboration costs with chains, agreements and institutions, as well as incentive programs to promote OP Mainnet activities and liquidity, and to support the expansion of OP Enterprise.

The Foundation believes that airdrops for widespread users are in the early stages of the project. The foundation noted that five rounds of airdrops have been completed, with a total of 269.1 million OPs distributed, and confirmed that no more rounds are planned. The foundation proposes not to disclose transactions on a transactional basis, but to report cumulative fund deployments through annual budget reports.

Critics are not satisfied with this arrangement. Ethereum expansion research platform L2BEAT opposes granting open authority to foundations, arguing that there is a lack of review of early collaboration spending and that the correlation between fund activity and token holder value is unclear. Polynya, an anonymous Rollup researcher, and other entrusted representatives believe that reallocating user quotas in the absence of specific transaction supervision is equivalent to rewriting commitments to the community. Several representatives also said the tokens had been promised to users and questioned how the foundation would justify the return.

Test in Prod says corporate timing is crucial

Test in Prod's defense of its vote focused on the urgency of the competition. "We are in a tough battle, with fierce competition in the corporate market and the window period is right now," the team wrote after the vote. "We believe this strategic reserve is needed now and should be careful to avoid disclosing information to competitors." The team required the foundation to disclose the overall deployment results after the transaction was completed, rather than prior disclosure, on the grounds that prior disclosure would give competitors an advantage. The team also requires that results be shared with the community in summary form, once confidentiality restrictions allow.

Optimism is an Ethereum (ETH) expansion project that operates OP Mainnet and develops OP Stack-a blockchain framework that has been adopted by more than 30 networks, including Base, Unichain, Kraken's Ink and Sony's Soneium. Each chain returns a portion of its revenue to Optimism. In July 2026, the project signed a memorandum of understanding with Viva Republica, the parent company of South Korea's mobile payment application Toss, which will conduct a three-month proof of concept to build a Kron-based stablecoin infrastructure for institutional payments. OP rose by about 11% on August 20 as the market rebounded as a whole, but still fell more than 93% from its historical high.