Optimism moves 546.9M OP from future airdrops to ecosystem growth fund

Blockchain Optimism’s governance has approved a proposal to repurpose 546.9 million OP tokens previously reserved for user airdrops to support ecosystem growth and institutional adoption.

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

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

The decision drew pushback from some delegates who argued the tokens had been promised to users and questioned how the foundation would measure returns from the fund. Supporters said the allocation would be better used to compete for enterprise deals and drive growth.

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 its current institutional push.

Optimism is an Ethereum (ETH) scaling project behind OP Mainnet and the OP Stack, the blockchain framework used by networks including Base, Unichain, Kraken’s Ink and Sony’s Soneium. More than 30 OP Stack chains currently contribute revenue to Optimism, according to the project.