Uniswap Governance - Decentralise #4
Uniswap leads the way
Uniswap exploded onto the DeFi scene this year.
The platform has handled a staggering $30b volume, and recently achieved $3b liquidity after less than a year in action. Currently Uniswap is responsible for 55.9% of all DEX trading volume.
Not only this, Uniswap’s simple UX and smart contract design paved the way for the entire food coin yield farming ecosystem.
Governance
Uniswap hasn’t just lead in the metrics, the protocol pulled off one of the largest scale attempts at decentralised governance this space has seen.
150,000,000 UNI (15% of total supply) were airdropped, with 400 tokens going to every address that had directly accessed the protocol before September 1st.
In total a staggering 60% of the 1b total token supply has been allocated to community members.
Alongside this community-focused distribution the team placed a strong emphasis on public ownership and the project’s core values:
“UNI officially enshrines Uniswap as publicly-owned and self-sustainable infrastructure while continuing to carefully protect its indestructible and autonomous qualities.”
A clear mandate was also outlined:
Uniswap has always embraced the tenets of neutrality and trust minimization : it is crucial that governance is constrained to where it is strictly necessary.
Uniswap set the stage for one of the most promising and far-reaching decentralised governance systems.
So why are so many people complaining today?
Discontent
Since the distribution some members of the community have voiced discontent with the preliminary voting rounds.
The first was initiated by Dharma, seeking to reduce the required threshold of yes votes (quorum) needed for a motion to be passed from 40m to 30m UNI.
Despite the vote having greater than 95% support, it did not reach the 40m UNI quorum and failed.
So where is the discontent stemming from?
Some community members viewed the proposal as a narrowly defeated hostile takeover, citing that a 30m quorum threshold would enable Dharma and other large players to effectively control all future governance.
However a decent chunk of Dharma’s UNI tokens were delegated from individual users, so it’s likely to be a little more complicated than that.
Today’s Vote
UNI holders have been asked to return to the polls once more this week. The new proposal seeks to extend the initial token airdrop to a further 12,619 addresses that interacted with Uniswap via a proxy contract.
This would see tokens distributed to users of a range of platforms, including Argent, DeFi Saver, Dharma and My Ether Wallet, and extend UNI governance to a group of users who might not otherwise get involved.
Track the proposal and vote here.
If UNI holders do feel threatened by Dharma and others then in future votes they need to voice that opposition with their UNI.
As it stands, 700,000 just won’t cut it.