On August 19, the Optimism community approved the transfer of 546.9 million OP tokens, worth approximately $49.7 million, from the reserve for future airdrops to the new ecosystem development fund. 17.97 million OP were voted in favor of the proposal, and 10.93 million were voted against. Before the Test in Prod team intervened, the initiative received 45.77% of “yes” votes, but after the developers contributed 8.486 million OP 17 minutes before the voting closed, support increased to 61.84%.

According to the Optimism Foundation’s proposal, the unallocated coins will be transferred to the Strategic Ecosystem Fund. These assets are intended for the development of OP Mainnet and the corporate direction of OP Enterprise. The fund will be able to use the tokens for partnerships with blockchains, protocols, and financial companies, to stimulate liquidity, and to attract major brands. The management of the funds will remain with the Optimism Foundation. The decision will not affect the distributions that have already been carried out. Over 5 rounds, the Optimism team distributed 269.1 million OP among users, and another 546.9 million remained reserved for future campaigns for a long time. At present, no new airdrops are planned. The foundation explained this by a change in strategy: at an early stage, the distributions were used to attract a wide audience, but now Optimism is placing greater emphasis on working with fintech companies, exchanges, payment services, and other organizations.

The decisive factor was the vote of the Test in Prod developers, who have been involved in creating various components of the OP Stack since 2022. The team manages 8.486 million votes delegated by 798 addresses. In June, it was re‑elected to the project’s security council. Test in Prod justified its support for the initiative by the need to compete for corporate clients. According to the developers, in such deals, tokens are often part of the offer, and disclosing the amounts before they are completed could play into the hands of competitors. At the same time, the team urged the Optimism Foundation to disclose the total amount of funds spent and the results achieved after concluding such agreements.

The proposal sparked controversy even before the vote. The L2BEAT research platform supported the idea of revising the allocation of the remaining tokens, but disagreed with the latest version. According to analysts, the fund is being granted too broad powers to distribute 546.9 million OP. The document does not provide sufficient detail on what specific purposes the funds will be used for, how the results will be assessed, and what benefits this will bring to OP holders. L2BEAT also proposed first analyzing the results of previous major Optimism partnership programs. An Optimism delegate with the handle cp0x also voiced criticism. He pointed out that the tokens were originally reserved specifically for future user airdrops, and after the proposal is approved, they will come under the management of the Optimism Foundation without a separate vote on each fund transaction. Other community members expressed similar positions, criticizing the decision to change the purpose of the coins, which were previously publicly presented as a reserve for future user distributions. As a reminder, in March, the developer of Optimism – OP Labs – laid off 20 people in order to speed up internal processes and reduce costs.