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.