Optimism token holders have voted to permit the transfer of 546.9 million OP — valued at roughly $49 million — out of the Collective's user airdrop reserve and into a new pool that the Optimism Foundation will manage. Voting closed on August 19, 2026.

Vote clears the 51% threshold with 62% support

The measure passed with 17,973,915 votes in favor against 10,930,696 opposed, according to the proposal page on Agora. That placed support at about 62% of votes cast, above the 51% approval threshold. The ballot also cleared its 16,540,389 quorum requirement. The proposal is now marked queued, with voting closed at 8:07 pm on August 19.

The outcome came down to a late deciding vote cast by a team funded by Optimism itself. The onchain record shows only the running totals, without indicating either the size of a single vote or the identity of the voter.

Filed by the Optimism Foundation, the proposal redesignates the OP remaining in the User Airdrop allocation as a Strategic Ecosystem Fund. That allocation supplied the Collective's series of retroactive airdrops to users, which ran from May 2022 through early 2024. The document carries no substantive onchain transactions; it is a governance decision about how a large block of tokens is labeled and who directs it. Queued proposals sit in Optimism's governance timelock before they can be executed and take effect.

The Foundation says the renamed fund would bankroll adoption of OP Mainnet and OP Enterprise. The proposal text covers "partnership deals that bring chains, protocols, institutions, and infrastructure to the OP Stack." It also includes incentives intended to strengthen activity and liquidity on OP Mainnet, along with plans to expand the OP Stack's reach with institutions and large brands. The OP Stack is the open-source technology behind OP Mainnet and the wider Superchain of networks running the same code, a group that includes Coinbase's Base. Tokens once earmarked for distribution to users thereby become a discretionary pool for business development.

Optimism Foundation strengthens its grip on OP

As Cryptopolitan reported at the time, the Collective passed OP-0017 in January, a proposal giving half of the Superchain's sequencer revenue to the Foundation to buy back OP each month. That measure passed with 84.4%, and its 12-month pilot kicked off in February, converting sequencer ETH into OP through an over-the-counter provider. That schedule carries the pilot into early 2027.

OP hit a low price of $0.2519 in December 2025. Since then, the Foundation has submitted several proposals that increase its power over the use of OP and treasury assets.

OP reached its all-time low of $0.08069 just three days ago, and even after this week's bounce the token sits only 25% above that floor. It currently trades at $0.1008, up 10.7% on the day and 14% on the week, according to CoinGecko. The layer-2 platform's token has a market capitalization of about $230.8 million and $57.8 million in 24-hour volume. Those figures imply a circulating supply of roughly 2.29 billion OP, which would put the redesignated 546.9 million token reserve at nearly a quarter of all OP in circulation. How the Foundation deploys the new fund — and which partnership deals it finances — will become visible through the Collective's governance records and the Foundation's announcements as the program starts.