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.
Our team voted to allocate $250k worth of $UNI towards Gnosis Chain incentives. This is a strong starting point for an initial round of incentives. The current DEX market dominance on Gnosis is led by Balancer, which in our opinion, means there’s a clear market opportunity for a more capital efficient, concentrated liquidity AMM to capture market share. Simply introducing Uniswap to Gnosis should increase the TVL of v3 pools off the bat. This deployment has technically been live for over a year now, but there hasn’t been a UI for LPs and swappers to interact with the protocol. Utilizing Oku as the FE should resolve this disparity.
A large package over $500k is likely not the best idea since there doesn’t seem to be fierce competition to dominate the market from day-one. This is usually the case with newly-launched EVMs–and Gnosis has been around for some time. Hence, the liquidity incentives here are primarily for initially drawing liquidity away from Balancer and Gyroscope. This initial jolt of incentives ideally leads to sticky liquidity in v3 pools. Plus, the overall volume on Gnosis Chain is less than that of other target chains that attained $250k worth of incentives. In a single day, for example, Gnosis will direct ~$3M of volume, while Scroll $30M, and Linea will do $40M. Therefore, the addressable market from a volume perspective is also comparatively smaller than that of other chains. This does mean that the introduction of Uniswap will increase the trading appetite on Gnosis, thereby expanding the market on the basis of volume.
We voted against instituting incentives for this deployment due to concerns surrounding liquidity. The incentive package itself would make up a large portion of the overall TVL on the chain. Although the DAO has offered incentives to chains with low TVL, many of them have had other catalysts to justify the spending. We don’t see an explicit one here.
Vote: 33.3% for Base, 33.3% for Blast, 33.3% for Scroll
Type: Snapshot
We selected some of the chains with less activity for the reasons below–along with Base:
We’d also like to highlight our concerns around overlap between the retroactive analysis that Gauntlet will be conducting on the LTIPP and what Forse will be analyzing. There were no incentives from the URGP for Arbitrum.
Our reasoning for the onchain vote remains the same as our decision from the temp check:
Our team voted to allocate $250k worth of $UNI to Gnosis Chain incentives, positioning Uniswap to capture market share from Balancer, the current DEX leader on the chain. A larger incentive package is unnecessary given the relatively low competition and smaller trading volume on Gnosis compared to other chains. The primary goal is to draw liquidity away from Balancer and Gyroscope.
We voted against instituting incentives for this deployment due to concerns surrounding liquidity in the precious temp check–but are of the belief that if any v3 deployment is approved of by the DAO, it should have a plan to incorporate a front-end. Hence, subsidizing the Oku integration makes sense. The matter around TVL deficiency is well-addressed here. It demonstrates buy-in from the OKX team, which could open doors for collaboration in the future. This deployment, however, should first demonstrate success in driving organic volume first. If there are other catalysts that arise for OKX chain in the future, we can also revisit incentives.
It would be an interesting experiment to see if adding additional lower fee tiers would materially enable Uniswap to capture volume from Aerodrome. Uniswap is still doing well, and it’s largely the case that Aerodrome itself is doing better than it historically has. Incentives are a large contributor to this success. Uniswap has stopped providing incentives to Base pools as of July 25. There doesn’t seem to be a material difference in volume post-incentives, at least at first glance. We’d need a more in-depth analysis to say for sure. It would also be interesting to see what the data show if incentives were to be normalized–unsure how difficult that is to do.
Lowering fee tiers will invariably lead to Aerodrome doing the same. So the risk of shifting liquidity, and hence fragmentation, along with a race to very ~no fees isn’t to be ignored. We are concerned regarding how much time this “experiment” will take to play out, especially with v4’s release being imminent. But if this fee addition can be put into effect soon, it could provide interesting data leading up to v4’s release.
Same as the temp check, we are For onboarding Uniswap v3 to X Layer by subsidizing the Oku integration. We also appreciate the liquidity commitment by the OKX team.
The first cycle of delegate rewards has further formalized contributions from active delegates. One point of feedback from the DAO was that newer and smaller delegates have an unfair disadvantage when it comes to attaining rewards. To help reduce this barrier of entry, this round introduced a more relaxed set of requirements, while simultaneously giving a marginal benefit to older delegates who have been contributing for a longer period of time. This setup incentivizes older delegates to be on top of their game since the penalty for missing a vote is quite high–and it allows for newer delegates to make their way into the top 15 eligible delegates with a higher degree of feasibility.
We voted to abstain from this proposal partly because we wanted to see if other DAOs would be moving forward with Attackathon grants. It feels more appropriate if various DAO committed smaller chunks of capital as opposed to a few committing large amounts. The Arbitrum onchain vote, for instance, has yet to conclude. Our hesitancy in supporting this proposal largely comes from the current allocation that the DAO has made to donations.
More UNI has been issued towards donations that protocols incentives, WG comp, and delegate incentives combined. This ratio should ideally decrease over time, and donations should be carefully considered prior to the DAO loosely committing to public goods funding. The DEF expenditure of $10M from earlier this year, in our eyes, should be the only donation we give out. If the commitment for the Attackathon were smaller, we’d be more inclined. Plus, if more Eth dapps were on board, the proposal would truly feel like a collective effort, as opposed to asking a small number of DAOs for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The UAC has played a critical role in ensuring a structured process for the deployment of v3 on various EVM environments. It also helps deploy and custody assets for various working groups and programs. This operational function is important for any DAO to have, so we are voting For this renewal.
In order to effectively cover the liabilities of the DAO, it is important to denominate program and working group accounts in terms of dollars—not the native token. The risk here is a spiral where the sell pressure from the issued UNI leads to more and more rebalancing. However, we believe that the allotment for rebalancing is negligible enough relative to the circulating supply to prevent any price spirals.
Vote: (1st) Tane, (2nd) Both (create an extra 16th spot), (3rd) Argonaut
Type: Snapshot
The primary issue with this vote was the fact that two applicants went through two rounds of tie-breakers before Tane was finally selected. Argonaut claimed that the process was unclear—which it was to an extent. It will be important to reduce any subjectivity in future votes. This particular scenario was a rare instance where both candidates voted on the same proposal, but Argonaut did so earlier. However, it was a part of the same vote, therefore, Argonaut should not be favored over Tane. There’s no point in rewarding someone for voting earlier, in most cases. As a result, the forum activity was considered to be the third tie-breaker, which was not effectively communicated to the DAO. However, this method has been used before, so if we had to choose a candidate, it would be Tane here.
As per our reasoning for the snapshot, we are voting For this proposal. The optionality for undercutting fees as a competitive measure seems like an interesting experiment. A primary concern is still the degree of incentives that Aerodrome has, which will eventually subside, and Uniswap will likely become more competitive again. Hence, we are viewing this more as an experiment.
As per the above snapshot reasoning, we are in favor of this proposal. It is important for the DAO to cover its liabilities in dollar terms, and the continuation of the UAC is important for effective operational execution of incentives, multi-chain deployments, and escrow/accountability for DAO-led teams and programs.
Someone has to conduct a retrospective analysis of the URGP. It is a critical step in moving forward with future incentive programs. We also elected to analyze protocols exclusively in the URGP and not the LTIPP:
Our team had some concerns about overlap between the retrospective analysis that would be completed by Gauntlet for the Arb LTIPP and the analysis that Forse would provide for the same protocol. StableLab communicated with Gauntlet to split the work around Arbitrum, so we are comfortable with supporting this analysis now.
