Hi all,
I’m loving the thoughtful discussion on this topic. Overall, it seems like there’s fairly strong consensus that Uniswap should fund outreach and advocacy. Protocol participants face an uncertain and potentially hostile legal environment, and educating policymakers could help avoid damaging conflicts down the road.
But it seems there’s less consensus over the amount of funds requested, and the oversight structure. The 1 million UNI requested would represent the largest DAO expense to date, and after approval Uniswap governance would have no direct control over the use of funds. Uniswap governance could approve incremental funding in smaller amounts, but there’s some concern that a minimally scoped initiative would be less effective or risk running out of money before fulfilling its mandate.
One potential solution is to add an oversight mechanism to the distributed UNI, allowing governance or an appointed admin to revoke funding if necessary. At Tally, we’ve been working on a project funded through Uniswap grants to enable this sort of direct on-chain oversight: Safeguard.
How it works:
- Funds are placed into a Safeguard timelock contract, controlled by an executive multisig.
- The multisig signers (eg potentially the committee members listed above) would submit a transaction to transfer a portion of funds out of the timelock - these funds could be sent to the organization’s legal entity account at an exchange to be converted to fiat. At the same time, they will communicate details and justification for the transaction to the community.
- If the transaction is suspicious, goes against community sentiment, or has insufficient information, a guardian mechanism can cancel the transaction while it is queued in the timelock. The guardian can also revoke funding and authority from the multisig entirely if needed.
- Assuming it is not cancelled during the timelock period, the transaction is executed and funds are sent to the intended parties.
This mechanism is highly configurable, and can support a variety of approval flows to suit the needs of governance. I think Safeguard could offer the best of both worlds for committee funding:
- Optimistic governance - additional funding tranches are approved/released by default unless an objection is raised
- Concrete oversight - governance can block transactions or retrieved remaining funds if the committee loses community support
I’m happy to answer any questions, and look forward to further discussion on this important topic! 