Thanks to everyone for the discussion. To address a few questions since my last post:
Re: the urgency of moving forward, there really isn’t anything confidential you need to know to understand the difficult policy environment we’re in now. It was all over this week’s news. Take the speech from CFTC Commissioner Berkovitz on Tuesday, for example. He said:
Not only do I think that unlicensed DeFi markets for derivative instruments are a bad idea, I also do not see how they are legal under the CEA…Apart from the legality issue, in my view it is untenable to allow an unregulated, unlicensed derivatives market to compete, side-by-side, with a fully regulated and licensed derivatives market…For all these reasons, we should not permit DeFi to become an unregulated shadow financial market in direct competition with regulated markets.
Thankfully Commissioner Berkovitz doesn’t speak for the entire CFTC, but it doesn’t take much for a speech like this to turn into new anti-DeFi guidance or rulemaking. We need to make our case to the CFTC now, not twelve months from now. The same is true for Congress, as you can tell if you listened to Senator Warren and her colleagues during yesterday’s Senate Banking Committee hearing.
Re: conflicts of interest, I think DeFi projects in general are incentive-aligned to the point that there’s no conflict in advocating for them as a category. The difficult question is how to define the category, which determines the projects that fall within our scope. This is something I’d want community feedback on, but not something I view as a conflict. For me personally, having worked on DeFi policy for a couple years now, I don’t anticipate any conflicts between my day job and my work here. If a conflict did arise, I’d handle it according to my fiduciary duties, abstaining or recusing myself if necessary.
Re: transparency, we’ve said a lot here about the steps we’ll take to keep the community informed and engaged. Because of the nature of the work, there may be some details that aren’t appropriate to publish online (advice of counsel, litigation strategy, etc.), which is why I said “as much public transparency as possible” in my last post. Regardless, I’m confident that we can and will share more than enough information for the community to assess our progress.
Re: WEF, I can’t tell anyone what to think about the organization, but I will say I hold Sheila in high regard and think she would bring a unique and valuable perspective to the program. She led the WEF’s DeFi Policymaker Toolkit project which resulted in solid work product, and from what I know, her views on DeFi are well-aligned with the community.
Re: funding, I agree with the comments from @dennisonb and @jmo on the size of the request. As I said before, I think the total amount is justified given the magnitude of the challenge. Still, I don’t think Uniswap has to fund it all at once, or alone. I support a smaller initial funding amount than proposed, with the expectation that we’ll make future requests from Uniswap and other protocols.
Re: accountability, I support governance having an oversight mechanism to keep the 501(c)(4) accountable, as long as it doesn’t discourage other protocols from contributing as well (such as if Uniswap has special oversight privileges). I don’t have any particular preference as to how oversight is achieved; perhaps a limited initial funding amount with the ability to deny future requests is sufficient.