Optimism-funded team's deciding vote shifts $49 million in OP tokens away from users
- A core Optimism development team cast a decisive 8.5 million OP vote, pushing a contentious proposal to approved status with minutes remaining.
- The plan allocates 546.9 million OP from user airdrops to a Foundation-controlled Strategic Ecosystem Fund.
- While the Foundation argues the fund is vital for growth, critics warned of insufficient oversight and unclear tokenholder value.
An Optimism-funded core development team cast a decisive 8.486 million OP vote that flipped a running tally and secured approval of a plan to move around $49.7 million worth of OP tokens from the user airdrop allocation into a Foundation-administered fund.
The proposal redesignates 546.9 million OP, or 12.7% of total supply, from the user airdrop allocation as a Strategic Ecosystem Fund administered by the Optimism Foundation meant to support the adoption and growth of the OP Mainnet and Enterprise.
The vote ended with 17.974 million OP in favor and 10.931 million against. With 16 minutes and 52 seconds left, delegate.testinprod-io.eth, or Test in Prod, cast a whale-sized vote in support, lifting approval to 61.84% from 45.77%.
Excluding that position, final approval would have been 46.47%. The proposal would have met quorum and kept the funds for user allocation.
Test in Prod’s Agora profile describes it as a core development team of the Optimism Collective. In a 2025 Security Council nomination, the team said it was “fully funded by the Collective,” and secured a new 12-month term on the Optimism Security Council in June.
Voting power was snapshotted on Aug. 13 at block 155,526,433, one week before voting closed. Any OP bought or delegated after that snapshot could not count toward the proposal.
The Optimism Foundation said broad user airdrops no longer match Optimism’s institutional adoption strategy and that the unspent tokens could instead support partnerships, incentives and enterprise deals. It proposed reporting cumulative deployment through its annual budget report, according to the proposal.
Ethereum scaling research platform L2BEAT objected to the open-ended authority, an unclear link to tokenholder value and the absence of a review of earlier partnership spending, while pseudonymous rollup researcher Polynya and others argued that the plan rewrote the user allocation without deal-specific oversight.
Test in Prod argued that enterprise bidding requires confidentiality and that Optimism needed the fund to compete.
“We're in an uphill battle, the enterprise market is expensive, and the window is now,” Test in Prod wrote. “We think we need the war chest today, and we should be careful about handing information to competitors.”
Test in Prod further asked the Foundation to disclose aggregate deployments and outcomes afterward. Various users on social media flagged other Optimism Team address clusters, suggesting more organized voting was ongoing.
