We are a governance group composed of ex-Michigan Blockchain members. Our team is currently made up of five individuals, all of which are deeply steeped in the crypto space and have multiple years of participation in protocol governance. With delegation history for DEXs, money markets, L2s, liquid staking protocols, and stablecoins, we’re acclimated with a breadth of sectors. We bring a diversity of experience to DAOs–our members have consulted for companies like Immutable and dYdX, worked at crypto investment and trading firms, set up various validator nodes, and run educational events for university students.
Core Values
Diligence: We thoroughly investigate each proposal, engaging with other delegates and service providers to gather diverse perspectives and insights prior to making a decision.
Transparency: We openly share information about decisions and their rationales, providing clear and accessible updates, and ensuring that all processes are effective to the community.
Innovation + Sustainability: We champion initiatives that will both allow the DAO and its underlying protocol to sustain its advantages, all the while continuously looking to iron out flaws and introduce efficiencies.
Past Contributions to Uniswap:
Our members have been active participants in the Uniswap DAO for the past 1.5 years under the Michigan Blockchain brand. History with the DAO allows us to make informed voting decisions. During our tenure, we’ve maintained an excellent voting record, passed numerous proposals, and collaborated with multiple other delegates, the Foundation, and adjacent teams associated with Uniswap.
A core aspect of our contribution has been around facilitating Uniswap growth and expansion:
Arana hopes to continue delivering on its members’ previous commitments to the Uniswap DAO going forward, abiding by transparent communication & thoughtful decision making, all with the intention of bettering Uniswap as a whole.
Conflict of Interest:
We are actively involved as delegates and contributors in multiple other DAOs. Arana also has an investment arm focused on allocating to small caps digital assets. Any relevant conflicts of interest will be publicized when needed.
Our team decided to bring this proposal to the DAO for the following reasons:
The $500k amount was chosen since it was the healthy middle option–enough to compete amongst the number of DEXs launching on the new EVM. Plus, this amount nearly matched Sei Foundation’s $400k POL commitment for the first running quarter.
We authored this proposal in order to help increase the efficiency of deployments. One can argue that a general precedent has been set for these deployments and editing the text record isn’t like a security concern or the like. It’s for text keeping and organization. And the uniswap timelock via a gov vote can always revoke the committee’s oversight over the subdomain, which makes this proposal effective at delivering operational efficiency.
This proposal was put forth AFTER the integration with Oku was complete, along with the deployment of all of the relevant v3 contracts. It is therefore a no brainer to vote For this proposal. The lackluster DEX environment on Manta also primes Uniswap to overtake its market share via the $250k worth of incentives.
This proposal continues to incentivize LPs on new EVM deployments for Uni v3. In order to attain market share and prioritize protocol growth, we voted For this proposal, especially since Sei and Moonbeam also contributed POL on their ends, partly matching our incentive allocations.
Vote: 25% for Steakhouse, GFX, Karpatkey, and Avantgarde
Type: Snapshot
Steakhouse, KPT, and Avantgarde have extensive experience with other DAOs’ treasury management programs–and GFX has been involved in treasury-based programs in DAOs like Arbiturm and Maker. All these teams have strong background in this subject matter and therefore get an even distribution of our votes.
The legal terrain is a tough one to navigate, and it’s seldom top of mind for builders in the space until the community faces some sort of calamity. It’s therefore vital to fund groups that have the connections and competency to effectively court the ears of politicians and regulatory bodies. There has been some confusion around why this magnitude of funding is required–but that’s simply because we fail to understand the overhead costs associated with activities like litigation. We find the ask to be fair and in alignment with the previous donation that the DAO gave out a few years ago. Although, we would like to see more updates, something that the DEF has promised this time.
As stated in the previous post, the 1M ask seems to be reasonable, and the proposed vesting setup makes the accountability aspect even stronger. Voting for a different option would also mean contradicting our previous vote.
Our team co-authored this proposal and therefore voted for it:
“The Uniswap DAO’s treasury, containing assets worth nearly ~$6B, predominantly in $UNI tokens, faces challenges due to its single-asset composition and the lack of a plan for productive utilization.
To address the treasury’s volatility and underutilization, we propose forming the Uniswap Treasury Working Group (UTWG) to explore treasury management strategies aimed at achieving sustainability and growth for the DAO. The UTWG will examine various treasury plans for Uniswap DAO based on 8 weeks of research and interviews with various entities and individuals familiar with treasury management and adjacent subject matters.”
The above comments from earlier summarize our opinions. We believe that this pilot program is a step in the right direction for the DAO’s incentive alignment with delegates.
We helped the Redstone team bring this proposal to the DAO. All the contracts were deployed and a front-end was set up posting the RFC. Therefore, it’s a no brainer to consider this deployment canonical. But the chain does not have enough traction nor liquidity to justify incentives yet. Plus, no matching was proposed by Redstone to warrant reciprocity.
As stated in our Snapshot justification above, we admire the crucial work that the DEF conducted over the past handful of years. We therefore endorsed the 1M UNI spend. In our conversations with the DEF, they explained how much more costly legal fees are than us delegates expect. This is certainly not our domain of expertise, so we are taking the word of those who have more experience in this subject matter. The following also gave us confidence in the DEF’s alignment with the DAO:
“It is important to us that DEF remains aligned with the DeFi community and our supporters over the long term. Upon passage, 500k $UNI tokens will be transferred to DEF’s on-chain Coinbase $UNI wallet, and 500k will be locked up in a streaming contract that will “vest” linearly over 12 months. Governance can vote to stop the streaming of the remaining tokens at any time.
We will hold half of any tokens we receive for at least 12 months from the date we receive them, and we will pre-disclose all sales plans in writing.”
Vote: (1st) $500k, (2nd) $250k, (3rd) $750k, (4th) $1m, (5th) Do not fund
Type: Snapshot
We voted to allocate a sufficient amount of capital as matching the Arbitrum DAO’s LTIPP allocation. Our work on the UADP has shown us that the Arbitrum ecosystem has strong respect for Uniswap, and this is empirically supported by the data. Uniswap currently has the largest market share by volume and TVL–and it’s not even close.
In order to sustain a healthy relationship with the Arbitrum DAO in the long run, we vied to allocate either 500k or 250k worth of incentives to this program. This would supplement the previous liquidity mining initiative that Gauntlet has been running for the past three quarters. Although, this time around, they are altering their methodology: “Unlike the previous Arbitrum LM campaign, which relied on a simulation-based framework to identify pools with the greatest boosts to price execution under different liquidity scenarios, this program employs a predictive model that reallocates a fixed budget towards pools with the highest response to incentives, ensuring dynamic and efficient allocation.” Our team is For this type of experimentation and therefore would endorse incentives over no incentives–but do hope for a medium-sized allocation as opposed to an exorbitant one.
We voted for $500k and $250k as our primary options during the Snapshot. Although we helped bring this proposal forth, we do believe that a more conservative amount of capital should have been allocated to LTIPP matching–ideally $500k being the cap. However, as we stated, in the event that we have to choose between no incentives and a larger amount of incentives, we would select the larger amount of incentives. That’s why we voted For the $750k allotment. This generally sends a strong message to the Arbitrum DAO regarding our continued interest and support for the L2’s ecosystem. Future incentive and grant programs could therefore be easier to attain from the Arbitrum ecosystem if we pass this proposal.
