Optimism's governance has approved a proposal to repurpose 546.9 million OP tokens, moving them from a reserve previously designated for user airdrops to a new ecosystem growth fund.
According to CoinGecko data, OP has a circulating supply of about 2.29 billion tokens and a market cap of roughly $214 million. At the token's trading price of around $0.09 on Thursday, the 546.9 million-token allocation is worth approximately $50 million, representing nearly a quarter of its market capitalization.
The newly established Strategic Ecosystem Fund is intended to support partnerships with protocols, chains, and institutions. It will also fund incentives designed to increase activity and liquidity on OP Mainnet while growing OP Enterprise.
The decision faced some opposition from delegates who raised questions about how the foundation will measure returns from the fund and argued that the tokens had been promised to users. Meanwhile, supporters maintained that the allocation is necessary to compete for enterprise deals and drive further growth.
Optimism stated that it has no additional airdrops planned after previously distributing 269.1 million OP across five rounds. The project noted that airdrops were more appropriate for an earlier phase focused on broad user acquisition rather than its current institutional strategy.
Optimism is an Ethereum scaling project that developed OP Mainnet and the OP Stack, a blockchain framework utilized by networks such as Base, Unichain, Sony’s Soneium, and Kraken’s Ink. More than 30 OP Stack chains currently contribute revenue to the project.
