A core development team funded by Optimism cast the deciding vote to re-designate 546.9M OP, worth about $49M, from the User Airdrop allocation into a new Foundation-run Strategic Ecosystem Fund.

The team's roughly 8.5M OP proved decisive, tipping the proposal to passage at about 17.97M OP for versus 10.93M against. Because the group is funded by the Optimism Foundation and voted on how Foundation-controlled tokens are spent, the outcome has drawn conflict-of-interest criticism from parts of the community.

The reallocation fits Optimism's wider pivot: airdrops and Retro Funding are paused, and the Collective has trimmed new OP commitments as it shifts toward enterprise adoption, Superchain revenue and institutional deals. The re-designated OP will back grants and partnerships for OP Mainnet and OP Enterprise instead of user rewards.

For a network that built its brand on user airdrops, redirecting the unused allocation to a Foundation-run fund, on a vote swung by a Foundation-funded team, is a governance flashpoint.

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