Optimism's governance has approved a proposal to repurpose 546.9 million OP tokens that were previously reserved for user airdrops, redirecting them toward ecosystem growth and institutional adoption.

OP currently carries a market capitalization of roughly $214 million, with a circulating supply of about 2.29 billion tokens, according to CoinGecko data.

The newly created Strategic Ecosystem Fund will support partnerships with chains, protocols and institutions, as well as incentives designed to increase activity and liquidity on OP Mainnet and to grow OP Enterprise.

The decision drew pushback from some delegates, who argued that the tokens had been promised to users and questioned how the foundation would measure returns from the fund. In Optimism's governance system, delegates vote on proposals using OP delegated to them by other token holders. Supporters countered that the allocation would be better used to compete for enterprise deals and drive growth, while the dispute leaves open how returns from the fund will be defined and measured as it begins deploying tokens.

Optimism vote to repurpose 546.9M OP. Source: Optimism

Optimism said it has no additional airdrops planned after distributing 269.1 million OP across five rounds, contending that airdrops were better suited to an earlier phase focused on broad user acquisition than to its current institutional push. Free token giveaways became one of the crypto industry's most widely used growth tactics, rewarding early users to bootstrap activity, though the approach has drawn criticism for attracting opportunistic claimants who quickly move on, prompting many projects to lean into grants and targeted incentive programs instead.

Optimism is an Ethereum (ETH) scaling project behind OP Mainnet and the OP Stack, the blockchain framework used by networks including Coinbase's Base, Unichain, Kraken's Ink and Sony's Soneium. Optimism refers to this collective of OP Stack networks as the Superchain, and more than 30 OP Stack chains currently contribute revenue to Optimism, according to the project, making enterprise adoption of the framework central to its growth model.

OP rebounds 11% but remains 93% below record high

OP traded around $0.09 on Thursday, up roughly 11% over the past 24 hours amid a broader crypto market rally. Despite the rebound, the token remains more than 93% below its all-time high.

At OP's current price, the 546.9 million-token allocation is worth around $50 million, equivalent to nearly a quarter of the token's roughly $211 million market capitalization. Source: CoinGecko

In July, Cointelegraph reported that the blockchain had signed a memorandum of understanding with Viva Republica, the operator of South Korea-based mobile money transfer app Toss, for a three-month proof-of-concept to test a Korean won-based stablecoin infrastructure for institutional payments, the type of institutional engagement the Strategic Ecosystem Fund is designed to support.

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