%1 to public goods

Proposal Discussion
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When governance voting starts, I am considering submitting a proposal that would redirect 1% of all inflows to the treasury to a Gitcoin Grants Multisig Wallet (0xde21F729137C5Af1b01d73aF1dC21eFfa2B8a0d6), in order to support public goods in the Ethereum ecosystem.

If ratified, every funding from the UNI treasury (or perhaps from fees) that went to the Gitcoin Grants wallet would be 100% used for public goods funding for the Ethereum ecosystem. This funding would be allocated:

  1. 50% to the Tech Grants category.
  2. 50% to a Uniswap Category, for public goods that have built upon Uniswap.

This proposal would be similar to recent proposals accepted into $YFI $YAMs and $BASED.

For the uninitiated, Gitcoin Grants is like a crypto-style patreon, powered by Quadratic Funding, that has delivered over $3mm of funding to Ethereum projects since Jan 2019. For more on Gitcoin, checkout the reviews of Gitcoin Grants and QF on Vitalik buterin’s website.

There are many promising projects in the community that support public goods (like ETH1/ETH2 development, L2 research, media, education, etc). Given Gitcoin’s long history of successfully supporting public goods on Ethereum at scale, without being captured, through a tough bear market, I believe Gitcoin is the strongest contender at the current moment, in this category.

There are two main reasons that I believe this is a good idea for the UNI community:

  1. ** Rational Economic Choice ** – By funding the infrastructure upon which Uniswap relies upon, we (1) support the foundation of OSS which your DEFI Bags depend upon (2) prevent black swan events, (3) fund the next cohort of innovations.

  2. ** High ROI Community Goodwill & Publicity **. We believe that Uniswap is a darling of the Ethereum ecosystem, and that funding public goods with a portion of Uniswaps economy will be a serious goodwill move that will ward off potential competitors (and maybe make CEXs like Coinbase + Binance have to join the party. This will make UNIs part of the broader conversation around rainbow colored money in the Ethereum ecosystem, and public goods funding in the information age.

  3. the funds that go to the Uniswap Category will support public goods in the Uniswap ecosystem, helping to solidify Uniswaps network effect.

If this proposal passes, I will commit to the following:

  1. 100% of the tokens that go to this wallet from the UNI contracts will be sent to public goods (minus gas fees, which I expect to be fairly negligible).

  2. Prominently listing UNIs as a co-funder of Gitcoin Grants Rounds, for each round it contributes funding similarly to how we have done for past funders.

  3. I would be happy to provide a report back to the UNI community on where the UNI funds went, once per quarter, for every quarter in which the value that the UNI system provided to Gitcoin Grants was more than $10k USD.

  4. architecting a system that stewards the multisig responsibly.

Feedback welcome on this. I will take the feedback into account when the formal proposal is submitted. In particular I’d love feedback on the simplest place to insert this into the uniswap system.

Gitcoin Founder, Kevin Owocki

TLDR

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34 Likes
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fwiw, the funds for this proposal dont go to a gitcoin wallet; they go to a community multi-sig (3 of 5 multi-sig with David Hoffman from Bankless, Eric/Anthony from EthHub, and Hudson Jameson from the EF, along with myself as signers)

if the community likes i could set up a uniswap-specific multi-sig thats got signers from the Uniswap community.

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I like the idea of giving grants but people should think about whether it’s sound to route all grants from Uniswap through what is essentially a commercial business (Gitcoin).

I don’t care what the community decides but people should at least think about this and discuss the pros/cons. I can think of at least a few

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This would be pretty good. As you say, Uniswap wouldn’t be possible without a tonne of underlying software. Supporting future development of the overall ecosystem would be great. Directing funds towards platforms that utilise uniswap would also drive value towards $UNI.

Though as a token holder I feel we could be a bit greedier. Maybe that 1% could be directed as 75% towards the Uniswap category and just 25% towards the general Tech category.

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@mewnieboy hey there! copying my response from twitter

right now we an arm of consensys, which is a swiss-AG.  long term, we are setting up a structure outside of consensys that will have aligned incentives (more details on this coming soon)

fwiw, the funds for this proposal dont go to our wallest; they go to a community multi-sig

another point to add: we are a first mover in the public goods funding space; we uniquely bring a battle tested system to the table short term. but med/long term i by no means want to be the only player. i think we have a great responsibility to be good stewards of the funds, and i think that means funding other funding goods mechanisms (meta, i know). if the community is open to it, i am considering putting together a “other public goods funding mechanisms” gitcoin grants rounds round, in which the capital we’ve aggregated for funding public goods is passed on to other great public goods funding projects in the community (whalerDAO, commons stack, CLRFund and tree come to mind)

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This is the best place to list those pros and cons!

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ill start on one just to play devil’s advocate but again i like Gitcoin and I like owocki so please dont take this as a negative opinion on them.

if people get use to Gitcoin being the defacto grants platform for ethereum, u become beholden to whatever commercialization models they opt for down the road or commercially motivated decisions they decide for (what if they want to one day launch a competitor - unlikely but possible). this seems quite dangerous to me. it would make more sense to route open source grants through non-commercial entities, structures or processes.

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ill start on one just to play devil’s advocate but again i like Gitcoin and I like owocki so please dont take this as a negative opinion on them.

adversarial thinking is always good. i have some scars from the block rewards funding debate 1.5 years ago, but it really sharpened my thinking about how to fund public goods without corrupting the base layer of the ETH system.

it would make more sense to route open source grants through non-commercial entities or models.

i agree that the model is inelegant right now, but hopefully my committments above (100% funding to public goods, no extraction) will be enough to get your support!

on a go forward basis, please consider whether your level of support for this proposal in each of the two scenarios:

  1. gitcoin’s legal entity is the legacy entity (current scenario)
  2. gitcoin is governed by it’s community (totally hypothetical scenario)
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if we can somehow guarantee these promises in code beforehand it would make it harder to argue against it.

my position is i dont really care what the community decides but just wanted to open the floor to some form of discussion

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I’m not too familiar with Gitcoin, but I do believe Uniswap should, one way or another, be pushing for the development of the overall DeFi space.

Uniswap, on its own, is nothing! It relies on there being a vibrant ecosystem that needs a streamlined DEX. We’ve got to do what we can do ensure the longevity and progress of that very ecosystem.

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:100: , but keep the governance simple. Just allocate money and frigate the allocation. Don’t allow governance to become encumbered in allocation.

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I’m not sure about gitcoin, but I totally agree that Uniswap should create a way to divest some of the money towards the funding of public goods.

The open web needs more funding!

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No. If you want to donate to that wallet, you can go right ahead. I see zero need to implement it on a global scale when everyone can do it themselves if they want to.

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The idea of grants is neat :upside_down_face:

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I completely support this proposal. Everyone is always complaining about how slow ethereum infrastructure is developed. If we had better funding for projects it could help advance research and development faster and bring in more developers. This doesn’t cost us much overall while potentially doing a lot of good for us.

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I support ideas in this general direction, for long term growth grants are a great tool since it pushes innovation if done properly.

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Would vote yes for this

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Yes on public goods. A lot of uniswap’s value is derived from the value of the ecosystem around it.

Abstain on gitcoin. I am not knowledgeable enough about that space to have opinion one way or another.

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I hear your concern, but I think we could always vote to cancel the allocation if Gitcoin did something in opposition to the ethos of the community. I prefer decentralization but I’m not maximalistic about working with centralized or commercial entities as long as they share the same vision.

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I am totally fan of the concept or giving back to the community on-top of which Uniswap was built.
Actually, I think it would be magical and make me very optimistic about this ecosystem as a whole.
However, I feel like there are lots of independent questions that need to be addressed :

  • Nature : Governance rights, or funds (I guess, UNI is technically both, but the intention and expectations are different).
  • Amount : 0.01%, 0.1%, 1%, 10% ?
  • Conditions : Only for voting ? Only for funding ? Or totally free to use as they wish ?
  • Recurrence : Flow or one-time action ?

And probably more questions that don’t come to my mind.
Those interrogations would be valid for every entity.

For example, one could propose to give 2.33% of the community treasury as UNI to the Ethereum Foundation (1% of total supply) as a one-time donation, with the condition of using those UNI only to vote (or cast).

1 Like