Re-designating the User Airdrop Allocation as the Strategic Ecosystem Fund

Proposals 📃
1

Proposal Type: Rights Protections

Executive Summary

The Optimism Foundation is proposing to re-designate the unspent tokens in the User Airdrop allocation as a new allocation category, the Strategic Ecosystem Fund, proposed for deploying tokens to grow OP Mainnet and OP Enterprise.

Motivation

For the Optimism Collective’s first several years, airdrops were among the most important tools the Foundation had. Across five airdrops, the Collective distributed 269.1M OP to bring hundreds of thousands of users and contributors into the ecosystem. Each was treated as an experiment and studied in the open, including through academic analysis of whether the mechanism achieved its goals, such as Did OP Airdrop 2 Increase Governance Engagement? by Andrew Hall and Eliza Oak and Did OP Airdrop 5 Increase User Retention Rates? A Regression Discontinuity Analysis.

Taken together, these findings point to a fit problem: airdrops were built for an earlier phase of the Collective’s growth, centered on broad based user acquisition. That motion does not match the institutional adoption strategy OP Mainnet and OP Enterprise are built around today. This is not necessarily a permanent verdict on airdrops as a mechanism, rather it reflects that, given what we’ve learned, they are not the right tool for Optimism’s present growth priorities. Should new designs or use-cases emerge that address these limitations, the Foundation will revisit this assessment.

The result is a mismatch in Optimism’s token allocation: With no airdrops currently planned, a substantial pool of tokens the Foundation is authorized to deploy remains bound to a purpose the Collective is not currently pursuing. At the same time, the allocation that has supported the Collective’s growth work, the Partner, Seed, and Unallocated funds, has been successful at supporting OP stack adoption to 40%+ market share of L2 transactions.

Meanwhile the Foundation’s strategy has entered a new phase: With OP Enterprise, Optimism offers production-grade, managed blockchain infrastructure to fintechs, exchanges, payments companies, and financial institutions moving onchain, across Fully Managed, Self Managed, and OP Mainnet tiers. OP Mainnet is the entry point of that journey: institutions can validate their model on the public network with real users and deep liquidity, then graduate to a dedicated chain when ready. This is already driving strong results across Bitpanda’s Vision Chain, Ink’s upgrade to Fully Managed, Dunamu signed MOU for GIWA Chain, and Ether.fi bringing payments-oriented DeFi to OP Mainnet with $220M in TVL and 70,000+ active cards.

Accelerating this growth requires additional deployment of tokens, both in partnerships and in deals that bring institutions onto the network. Thus, the Foundation is proposing to repurpose the unspent tokens from the User Airdrop allocation into a new allocation, the Strategic Ecosystem Fund, dedicated to growing OP Enterprise and OP Mainnet. This ensures idle tokens can be put to productive use and aligns Optimism’s token allocation with Optimism’s strategy.

Specifications

Technical details

  • Create a new allocation category, the Strategic Ecosystem Fund, within the overall OP token allocations.
  • Re-designate the unspent Airdrop allocation balance of 546.9M OP to the Strategic Ecosystem Fund.
  • The purpose of the Strategic Ecosystem Fund is to deploy tokens to grow OP Mainnet and OP Enterprise adoption, including partnership deals that bring chains, protocols, institutions, and infrastructure to the OP Stack; incentives that deepen onchain activity and liquidity on OP Mainnet; and deals that expand the OP Stack’s reach with institutions and top-tier brands.
  • Tokens already distributed via Airdrops #1 through #5 are unaffected.

Action Plan

  • Upon approval, the Foundation updates the OP token allocation documentation to reflect the Strategic Ecosystem Fund and its purpose, and reflects the re-designation in the public token accounting.
  • Tokens deployed from the Strategic Ecosystem Fund follow the Foundation’s existing deployment and reporting practices.
  • Progress and cumulative deployment are reported to the Collective through the yearly Foundation budget report.

Conclusion

Rather than leave a large pool of tokens locked to a purpose the Collective no longer pursues, this proposal re-allocates those tokens toward the growth of OP Mainnet and OP Enterprise.

The Foundation requests the Collective’s approval to re-designate the unspent Airdrop allocation as the Strategic Ecosystem Fund.

4 Likes
2

I support the strategic rationale for re designating the unused 546.9M OP allocation, since no further user airdrops are currently planned and Optimism is prioritizing OP Mainnet and OP Enterprise adoption.

However, this is a large change in the intended use of OP supply. The Strategic Ecosystem Fund should therefore have stronger transparency and accountability than standard deployment reporting alone.

I would like to see clear public reporting on:

OP deployed by category, including partnerships, liquidity incentives, infrastructure, and institutional deals

Recipient level disclosure, allocation size, lockup or vesting terms, and any clawback conditions

Measurable outcomes, such as retained users, liquidity quality, fees, developer activity, and chain adoption

A clear distinction between OP Mainnet public goods growth and OP Enterprise commercial deals

Periodic review by the Collective on whether deployments are delivering sustainable ecosystem value rather than short term activity

Reallocation can be reasonable, but token holders and delegates need enough visibility to assess dilution risk, capital efficiency, and alignment with the Collective’s mission. With these safeguards, I am supportive of the proposal.

3 Likes
3

I am against this proposal
More OP has already gone into the ecosystem growth bucket than to users — and the results speak for themselves.

User airdrops distributed 269.1M OP.
The Ecosystem Fund (Partner + Seed + Unallocated) has already committed ~686M OP — more than 2.5× as much. Hundreds of millions more have unlocked and circulated from earlier partner deals.

This was promised to users. we have used the airdrop allocation like a carrot on a string dangling it in front of users, now we want to sweep it into strategic eco fund. the reason the airdrop is unspent is because the foundation doesn’t distribute it. almost as if this was the plan from the beginning. a few years ago Ben said something on the lines of … OP drop, users can expect OP drops more frequently… since then 0 OP airdrops… and now we want to used it a different way…

Yet here we are in mid-2026: OP Mainnet is still not the dominant public chain most people actually use day-to-day, Superchain market share has slipped from earlier peaks, and the pivot to “OP Enterprise” is still in its early, unproven stages. The Foundation itself just cut overall new commitments by ~35% and paused Retro Funding because the previous broad spend wasn’t delivering the desired ROI.

Now the proposal wants to take the remaining 546.9M OP that was explicitly earmarked for users and fold it into yet another Foundation-controlled growth fund. That is not “aligning allocation with strategy.” It is quietly rewriting the original social contract after the user-facing side of the experiment under-delivered relative to the much larger ecosystem spend that already happened.

I am fully against this. we are just screwing users with this proposal. just distribute OP drops like promised.

very disappointing

9 Likes
4

I’m against this proposal.

I understand the shift toward OP Mainnet and enterprise adoption, but the community and users are still a major part of the ecosystem.

Farmers and active users bring liquidity, transactions, experimentation, and attention to the ecosystem. With the right incentives, many can become long-term users and contributors.

The broader crypto market is still relatively weak, which makes airdrops harder, but they should still be considered depending on market conditions.

I’d rather see at least half of the remaining allocation, or some meaningful portion, reserved for future airdrops instead of fully removing it from the community.

2 Likes
5

In its current form, I am not in favor of this proposal.

There are pros and cons on both sides, whether the funds are use for airdrop or allocated toward an ecosystem fund. It is clear from on-chain metrics that Optimism is lagging behind other major L2s. While both an airdrop and ecosystem expansion could potentially help the network grow, this proposal is too vague and leaves many questions unanswered.

Using the Base deal as a reference (approx. 115M OP over 6 years), my advice would be to lower the requested amount to around 120M OP (target two for a duration of three year). If legal constraints prevent disclosing the specific ask or terms of potential deals, I would argue that tentative plan and a cap of approximately 60M OP is a reasonalble ask.

Furthermore, I believe an airdrop could significantly boost chain activity, and that option should remain on the table. A dual strategy that combines targeted ecosystem grants with user-facing airdrops typically yields higher user retention and daily active addresses than a single massive grant program.

5 Likes
6

The following reflects the views of L2BEAT’s governance team, composed of @kaereste and @Manugotsuka, and is based on their combined research, fact-checking, and discussion.

We voted AGAINST.

We agree that Optimism should rethink what to do with the remaining User Airdrop allocation. Keeping 546.9M OP reserved for broad user airdrops that are not currently planned does not seem like a great outcome either.

Our issue is with the solution being proposed here. We are not against repurposing the allocation, and we understand the broader direction of using tokens to support OP Mainnet, OP Enterprise, and Superchain growth. But this proposal does not do enough to justify moving such a large amount of OP into a broad Strategic Ecosystem Fund.

That matters because the mandate is very open-ended. “Growing OP Mainnet and OP Enterprise adoption” can mean many different things: partnership deals, incentives, institutional relationships, infrastructure support, or other strategic initiatives. For an allocation of this size, tokenholders should have a clearer view of what kinds of deployments are expected, how they will be evaluated, and what success should look like.

We are especially concerned that the proposal does not clearly connect this strategy to value for OP tokenholders. OP Enterprise may be a reasonable direction for OP Labs, and bringing more chains or institutional partners into the ecosystem may be valuable in a broader sense. But the proposal does not explain clearly enough how those outcomes translate into value for the OP token.

We would also like to see a clearer assessment of previous large partnership efforts before approving a new mandate of this scale. If past partnership programs are being used as part of the case for this new fund, tokenholders should be able to understand what worked, what did not, and what lessons are being carried forward.

9 Likes
7

Firstly, a personal update. I had announced resigning from OP governance in Jan 2025 with 1 year’s notice. In Jan 2026, I hadn’t shed enough votes, so I “soft-resigned” - reserving the right to vote on important or contentious proposals. That time has come, so I will be voting on this proposal.

I have been a vocal critic of $OP’s tokenomics since day 1, in replies here, in informal chats, but also in formal discussions, everything from reducing inflation to 0%, to pausing Governance Fund to burning RetroPGF and implementing a monetary policy proposal type to voting against budget proposals. Most of my recommendations (other than inflation adjustment) were unpopular and fell on deaf ears. $OP price was $1-$4 during much of this time, and a lot of people simply assumed I was a delusional doomer about $OP’s monetary policy. Indeed, my failure in convincing people about the matter was one of the reasons I resigned - there was simply too much of a gap between my interest in fiscal prudence and the indiscriminate mismanagement of $OP.

Given that context, it will be no surprise that I think this is an irresponsible and dishonest proposal and I have voted against.

To be clear, the strategy of appealing to enterprise is fine. Cancelling the airdrops also has some merit, given they failed to increase the userbase adequately after a point. However, this proposal fails to address past evidence, learnings, and risks - plenty of which suggests the Foundation’s handling of $OP and incentives has been a mixed bag at the very best. Appropriating 24% of circulating supply or 12.5% of total supply with vague handwaving is unacceptable at this stage.

Instead, there should be a detailed, transparent, well-justified proposal for how exactly the funds will be used, and how they might lead to a different outcome than the failures of the past. I’d recommend a different proposal for each “deal”.

Lastly, I will point out the real issue is OP’s tech hasn’t kept up to where it needs to be in 2026, the decentralisation I had asked for in 2022 still hasn’t materialised, but most importantly of all, demand for applications simply hasn’t been there, and ecosystem-wide, there have been inadequate efforts to stimulate that. I won’t even mention the $OP token.

8 Likes
8

@polynya The return of your voice to this forum comes at the exact moment the Token House needs it most. Your diagnosis of “vague handwaving” regarding a 546M OP reallocation is the defining structural failure of this ecosystem.

You correctly highlight that demand for applications hasn’t materialized, and that past incentives have been a mixed bag at best. The root cause is a severe infrastructural deficit: the DAO lacks an automated, trustless mechanism to measure Capital Efficiency and post-grant developer retention. We are flying blind.

If the Foundation intends to deploy a massive “Strategic Ecosystem Fund,” it cannot do so using the same broken tracking methodologies of the past. It must be paired with programmatic data architectures that enforce strict budget-to-outcome linkages.

I have recently architected the S10 Capital Efficiency Oracle specifically to cure this exact accountability vacuum—replacing narrative-based funding with deterministic, on-chain ROI tracking.

I invite you to review the operational mandate and cryptographic safeguards here:

[[RFC] Operational Mandate: S9 Impact Autopsy & S10 Capital Efficiency Oracle]

Until the DAO integrates objective impact tracking, deploying 24% of the circulating supply into another opaque growth fund is, as you stated, fiscally irresponsible.

3 Likes
9

I like the strategic direction of this proposal and the shift from broad user incentives toward bringing serious businesses, financial institutions, and infrastructure into the OP ecosystem.

However, as a long-term OP holder, I think there is still an important missing link: how does the success of this strategy ultimately translate into value for OP itself?

If the Strategic Ecosystem Fund succeeds and OP Stack / OP Enterprise activity grows significantly, it would be helpful to understand whether there is a longer-term plan to connect that growth to the token economically — through staking, revenue sharing, buybacks, security requirements, or another mechanism.

Otherwise, we may end up with a very successful ecosystem and a token whose role remains primarily governance.

I think clarifying this connection would make the proposal — and the long-term case for OP — considerably stronger.

10

The proposal to re-designate the airdrop allocation as the Strategic Ecosystem Fund has passed. Thank you to everyone who engaged and shared feedback on the proposal. The sharpest criticism in this thread was about accountability, not strategy, and that feedback has been heard.

The mandate is unchanged from the proposal: grow OP Mainnet and OP Enterprise adoption, including partnership deals that bring chains, protocols, institutions, and infrastructure to the OP Stack; incentives that deepen onchain activity and liquidity on OP Mainnet; and deals that expand the OP Stack’s reach with institutions and top-tier brands. We’re measuring the success of token deployment against two numbers: OP Mainnet TVL and OP Enterprise customer growth.

Several of you asked for more public accountability on how these tokens are spent. Disclosing terms of individual deals weakens our negotiating position, and puts Optimism at a competitive disadvantage. Private terms do not mean unaccounted deployment. We will continue reporting cumulative deployment, and its impact, through the annual Collective budget report, as committed in the proposal.

The Strategic Ecosystem Fund aims to build on the success of recent partnerships, such as Ether.fi, who migrated $220M in TVL and 70,000+ active cards to OP Mainnet. That TVL now stands at $347M. In August, Ether.fi moved its lending backend onto a dedicated Aave V4 instance on OP Mainnet, now live and targeting $500M in lending capacity as it scales past the in-house system it outgrew. Active cardholders have passed 100,000. Per a16z’s latest data on crypto card spend, Optimism now carries roughly 29% of crypto card settlement volume, the largest share of any chain tracked, and Ether.fi is a significant part of why. The Strategic Ecosystem Fund will enable the Optimism Foundation to support more partnerships of this kind.

1 Like
11

I understand the strategic logic, but I think the community concern is also valid. User airdrops were not only a distribution tool; they were part of the social expectation that real users would continue to have a direct path into the Collective.

If the allocation is moved toward ecosystem and enterprise growth, I would want to see very clear reporting on what kind of users or partners are being brought in. For example, if growth efforts target fintechs, exchanges, or platforms like BYDFi, the Collective should be able to measure whether that actually brings retained on-chain users to OP Mainnet, not only partnership announcements.

The distinction between short-term activity, institutional integration, and long-term public network usage needs to be very transparent.

12

If the allocation moves away from user airdrops and toward strategic ecosystem development, how will ordinary user adoption remain visible in the fund’s success criteria?

Institutional partnerships may increase transaction volume or infrastructure adoption without necessarily showing whether independent users are adopting self-custody or returning to applications regularly.

Could reporting distinguish enterprise-driven activity from retained individual users and repeat application usage? I’m not arguing that airdrops should continue, but I think user adoption should remain a measurable outcome.