Who has the right to rewrite the founding promise? The dispute over 547 million OP tokens in Optimism DAO.

Written by: Xiaobing

On the evening of August 19th, a vote on the Optimism governance platform Agora had 16 minutes and 52 seconds remaining. On the screen, 45.77% of the votes were in favor, and the proposal was on the verge of being rejected.

The proposal is to transfer 546.9 million OP tokens from the "user airdrop" quota to the "strategic ecosystem fund" managed by the foundation. This amount of tokens is equivalent to 12.7% of the total supply and nearly 24% of the circulating supply.

Then, a vote of 8.49 million OPs was cast. The approval rate instantly jumped to 61.84%, and the proposal passed.

The team that cast this vote was Test in Prod. Their self-introduction on Agora clearly states: the core development team of the Optimism Collective. In their 2025 Security Committee nomination document, they wrote: "fully funded by the Collective." This June, they just secured their 12-month seat on the Security Committee.

A core team fully funded by Optimism cast a decisive vote in the final 17 minutes, transferring approximately $49.7 million worth of tokens from users' pockets to the foundation's account.

Whose money is it, and who gets to decide?

The foundation has its own logic. Optimism conducted five airdrops from 2022 to 2024, distributing a total of 269.1 million OP tokens to users, but the effectiveness decreased with each round. Academic analysis and on-chain data both indicate that the later airdrops had minimal impact on user retention. The foundation's conclusion is that large-scale airdrops are suitable for early customer acquisition but not for the current institutional expansion phase.

OP Enterprise is the foundation's current strategic focus.

Bitpanda launched Vision Chain on Optimism, South Korea's largest exchange Dunamu signed a memorandum of understanding for GIWA Chain, and Ether.fi generated $220 million in TVL and over 70,000 active payment cards on the OP Mainnet. The foundation believes that acquiring these enterprise clients requires a flexible token arsenal, rather than continuing to lock 547 million OP tokens under an unused "airdrop" label.

Test in Prod defended its vote bluntly: corporate bidding requires secrecy, the window of opportunity for competition is fleeting, and Optimism needs this war fund.

Opponents see something else.

L2BEAT, an independent research firm in the Ethereum Layer 2 space, voted against it.

Their wording deserves careful reading: the foundation's authorization is too broad, there's a lack of clear connection between token deployment and the interests of OP holders, and the effectiveness of previous rounds of partner investments hasn't been formally evaluated. In a system where 686 million OPs have already been spent on the ecosystem fund (including Partner, Seed, and Unallocated categories), adding another 547 million to a vaguely defined new fund is, in L2BEAT's opinion, insufficiently supported by evidence.

Polynya, an independent researcher who was involved in Optimism governance for a long time and resigned her representative position in 2025, made a comeback specifically for this vote. Her judgment was more pointed: entrusting 24% of the circulating shares to a "vague wave of the hand" is irresponsible, given that the foundation's previous incentive spending has been at best mixed.

A community member named Luckyhooman.eth pointed out the most disheartening fact: approximately 686 million OP tokens have already been allocated under the ecosystem fund category, more than 2.5 times the total amount airdropped to users. Yet, OP Mainnet has yet to become a mainstream public chain used by users on a daily basis. Taking the airdrop quota away from users is tantamount to rewriting the initial allocation promise before the user-side experiments have been fully tested.

The real problem is not voter turnout.

A classic challenge in on-chain governance is low voter turnout. But Optimism's problem was the opposite: enough people participated, and a quorum was met. The proposal passed because a voter with a special status changed the outcome at the last minute.

This raises a deeper question. When a team's funding, compensation, and future contract renewals all depend on the foundation's decisions, to what extent is the team's voting on the foundation's budget proposal an independent judgment? In traditional corporate governance, this is called a related-party transaction, and at the very least, stakeholders should abstain from voting. In the world of DAOs, this rule currently does not exist.

At a more fundamental level, can DAO governance voting rewrite the distribution commitments made at the time of creation?

When Optimism issued its OP token in 2022, it clearly stated in black and white that 19% of the total supply would be allocated to users for airdrops. This figure was included in the token economics document, recorded by major data platforms, and regarded by countless users as a long-term expectation for participating in the Optimism ecosystem. Renaming the remaining airdrop amount as a "strategic fund" at the foundation's disposal through a majority vote may be legally compliant, as DAO governance is inherently designed as a mechanism that can modify all parameters. However, it undermines something much more sensitive: users' trust in the project team's promises.

The price of OP has fallen from $4.85 in March 2024 to around $0.09 today, a drop of more than 98%.

At this price point, 546.9 million OP tokens are worth approximately $49.7 million, nearly a quarter of OP's market capitalization. For the foundation, this is ammunition that can be immediately deployed in corporate bidding. For retail investors still holding OP, this is a signal that the airdrop shares they had been anticipating have been officially cancelled.

Looking back, DAO governance is heading towards an ironic convergence point: it invented on-chain voting to replace the closed-door decision-making of the board of directors, but ultimately reproduced the most classic dilemma in board governance: who will supervise the supervisors, and whether the majority vote can legally redefine the rights of the minority.