Written by Xiao Bing
On the evening of August 19, with 16 minutes and 52 seconds remaining until the deadline, a vote on the Optimism governance platform Agora showed 45.77% in favor, and the proposal appeared poised to be rejected.
The proposal states: Transfer 546.9 million OP tokens from the "user airdrop" allocation to the "Strategic Ecosystem Fund" under the foundation’s management. These tokens represent 12.7% of the total supply and nearly 24% of the circulating supply.
Then, a vote of 8.49 million OP was cast, instantly pushing the approval rate to 61.84%, and the proposal passed.
The vote was cast by Test in Prod. Their self-introduction on Agora clearly states: "Core development team of the Optimism Collective." In their 2025 Security Council nomination document, they themselves wrote: "fully funded by the Collective." This past June, they were just awarded a new 12-month term on the Security Council.
A core team fully funded by Optimism cast the decisive vote in the final 17 minutes, transferring approximately $49.7 million worth of tokens from users’ wallets to the foundation’s account.
Whose money, whose decision?
The foundation has its own logic: Optimism conducted five airdrops from 2022 to 2024, distributing a total of 269.1 million OP tokens to users, but the effectiveness diminished with each round. Academic analysis and on-chain data both indicate that the later airdrops had minimal impact on user retention. The foundation concluded that broad airdrops are an effective tool for early user acquisition but are not suitable for the current stage of institutional expansion.
OP Enterprise is now the foundation's strategic focus.
Bitpanda launched on Optimism, Korea’s largest exchange Dunamu signed an MOU with GIWA Chain, and Ether.fi brought $220 million in TVL and over 70,000 active payment cards to OP Mainnet. The foundation believes that securing these enterprise clients requires a flexible token arsenal, rather than continuing to lock 547 million OP tokens under an unused "airdrop" label.
When defending their own vote, Test in Prod was blunt: business bids require confidentiality, the competitive window is fleeting, and Optimism needs this war chest.
Opponents see something else.
L2BEAT, an independent research firm in the Ethereum Layer 2 space, voted against.
Their wording warrants careful, line-by-line reading: the authorization granted to the foundation is overly broad, there is a lack of clear alignment between token deployment and the interests of OP holders, and the impact of previous rounds of partner contributions has not been formally evaluated. In a system that has already allocated 686 million OP to the ecosystem fund (including the Partner, Seed, and Unallocated categories), adding another 547 million to a newly defined, vaguely outlined fund, L2BEAT believes the evidence is insufficient.
Polynya, an independent researcher who previously participated extensively in Optimism governance and stepped down as a representative in 2025, has returned specifically for this vote. His assessment is more pointed: allocating 24% of the circulating supply to a vague, hand-waving promise is irresponsible, especially given that the foundation’s prior incentive expenditures have at best yielded mixed results.
A community member signed as Luckyhooman.eth highlighted the most painful truth: approximately 686 million OP have already been allocated to the ecosystem fund, more than 2.5 times the total amount distributed to users via airdrops. Yet, OP Mainnet has not yet become a mainstream blockchain for everyday user adoption. Taking away airdrop allocations from users amounts to rewriting the original distribution commitment before user-side experiments have been adequately tested.
The real issue is not the voter turnout
The classic challenge of on-chain governance is low voter turnout. But Optimism’s issue this time was the opposite: there was sufficient participation, and quorum was met. The proposal passed because a voter with a special status changed the outcome at the last moment.
This raises a deeper question: To what extent can a team’s vote on the foundation’s budget be considered an independent judgment when its funding, compensation, and future contract renewals all depend on the foundation’s decisions? In traditional corporate governance, this would be considered a related-party transaction, requiring interested parties to abstain from voting. In the DAO world, however, no such rule currently exists.
At a more fundamental level: Can DAO governance voting override the allocation commitments made at the genesis moment?
When Optimism issued the OP token in 2022, it explicitly stated that 19% of the total supply would be allocated to user airdrops. This figure was documented in the tokenomics whitepaper, recorded by major data platforms, and relied upon by countless users as a long-term expectation for participating in the Optimism ecosystem. Renaming the remaining airdrop allocation as a "strategic fund" under the foundation’s discretionary control via a simple majority vote may be legally compliant—DAO governance is inherently designed to modify any parameter. But it undermines something more delicate: users’ trust in the project’s commitments.
OP's price dropped from $4.85 in March 2024 to around $0.09 today, a decline of over 98%.
At this price, 546.9 million OP tokens are worth approximately $49.7 million, nearing a quarter of OP’s market capitalization. For the foundation, this represents ammunition that can be immediately deployed in corporate bidding. For retail holders still holding OP, it signals the formal cancellation of the airdrop份额 they once anticipated.
Looking back, DAO governance is arriving at an ironic convergence: it invented on-chain voting to replace the boardroom’s closed-door decisions, only to reproduce the most classic dilemma of board governance—who watches the watchers—and whether a majority vote can legitimately redefine the rights of minorities.