Who has the right to rewrite the founding commitment? The dispute over 547 million OP of Optimism DAO

Written by: Xiaobing

On the evening of August 19, a vote on the Optimism governance platform Agora had 16 minutes and 52 seconds left until the deadline. On the screen, the approval rate was 45.77%, and the proposal was about to be rejected.

The content of this proposal was to transfer 546.9 million OP tokens from the "user airdrop" allocation to the "strategic ecological fund" under the jurisdiction of the foundation. This amount of tokens accounted for 12.7% of the total supply and nearly 24% of the circulating supply.

Then, a vote of 8.49 million OP came crashing down. The approval rate instantly jumped to 61.84%, and the proposal passed.

The vote was cast by Test in Prod. This team clearly stated in their self-introduction on Agora: the core development team of the Optimism Collective. In the security committee nomination document for 2025, they wrote a sentence themselves: "fully funded by the Collective." In June of this year, they had just secured a new 12-month seat on the security committee.

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

Whose money, whose say?

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

OP Enterprise is now the strategic focus of the foundation.

Bitpanda launched Vision Chain on Optimism, South Korea's largest exchange Dunamu signed a memorandum of understanding for GIWA Chain, and Ether.fi brought 220 million USD in TVL and over 70,000 active payment cards to the OP Mainnet. The foundation believes that to secure these enterprise clients, a flexible token ammunition depot is needed, rather than continuing to lock 546.9 million OP under a now-unused "airdrop" label.

Test in Prod defended their vote bluntly: Corporate bidding requires confidentiality, and the competitive window is fleeting; Optimism needs this war fund.

Opponents see another issue

The independent research organization L2BEAT in the Ethereum Layer 2 space voted against the proposal.

Their wording is worth reading sentence by sentence: the authorization obtained by the foundation is too broad, there is a lack of clear connection between token deployment and the interests of OP holders, and the effects of previous rounds of partner investments have not been formally evaluated. In a system that has already spent 686 million OP on the ecological fund (including Partner, Seed, and Unallocated categories), adding 546 million to a vaguely defined new fund is seen by L2BEAT as insufficient evidence.

Polynya, an independent researcher who had long participated in Optimism governance and resigned from his representative position in 2025, made a special return for this vote. His judgment is sharper: handing over 24% of the circulating supply to a "vague waving promise," given the foundation's previous incentive spending effects were at best mixed, is irresponsible.

A community member named Luckyhooman.eth pointed out the most painful fact: Approximately 686 million OP has already been invested under the ecosystem fund category, which is more than 2.5 times the total amount of user airdrops. Yet, OP Mainnet has not become a mainstream public chain for daily user use. Taking the airdrop allocation away from users means rewriting the initial distribution promise without fully testing the experiments on the user side.

The real issue is not the voting rate

A classic problem of on-chain governance is that the voting rate is too low. But Optimism's issue this time is exactly the opposite: enough people participated, and the quorum was met. The proposal passed because a voter with a special identity changed the outcome at the last moment.

This opens up a deeper question. When a team's funding source, salary distribution, and future contract renewals all depend on the foundation's decisions, to what extent is that team's vote on the foundation's budget an independent judgment? In traditional corporate governance, this is called a related party transaction, and at least stakeholders need to abstain from voting. In the world of DAOs, there is currently no such rule.

At a more fundamental level: Can DAO governance votes rewrite the distribution promises made at the founding moment?

When Optimism issued the OP token in 2022, it clearly stated that 19% of the total supply would be allocated to user airdrops. This figure was written into the token economics document, included by major data platforms, and regarded by countless users as a long-term expectation for participating in the Optimism ecosystem. Using a simple majority vote to rename the remaining airdrop allocation as the foundation's discretionary "strategic fund" may be legally compliant, as DAO governance is designed to modify all parameters. But it undermines something softer: the trust users have in the commitments made by the project team.

The price of OP has fallen from 4.85 USD in March 2024 to around 0.09 USD today, a decline of over 98%.

At this price level, 546.9 million OP is worth approximately 49.7 million USD, close to a quarter of OP's market value. For the foundation, this is ammunition that can be immediately invested in corporate bidding. For retail investors still holding OP, this is a signal that their previously anticipated airdrop share has been officially canceled.

Looking back, DAO governance is heading toward an ironic convergence point: It invented on-chain voting to replace the board's backroom decision-making, yet ultimately replicated the most classic dilemma of board governance: who supervises the supervisors, and can a majority vote legally redefine the rights of the minority.