Excellent feedback, @Pinotio.com, thanks for offering.
Many years ago someone told me, ‘if you pay peanuts you get monkeys’. I always wondered if monkeys ate peanuts (shouldn’t it be elephants?), but…well…you get the idea. Ultimately, value-add service requires fees. Here’s what ours are comprised of:
Data Management and Transformation:
This includes pipelining, node management, and enabling the data to be analytics-ready. There is a significant amount of IP here, which has been honed across 40 blockchains over the last 3 years. It enables the ability to make the data clean and easy-to-query (and read-ready, in essence simplifying code to be able to access any historical data at any time); it includes extensive labeling, proprietary algorithms, a fully-developed API and product tooling, which makes it accessible to analysts in training, while also robust enough for DeFi natives and data wizards.
Community Education and Management:
In order to deliver Community-Enabled Analytics, it’s critical to have active, inspired analysts, as well as a structure to motivate them to deliver effectively. This includes traditional community management frameworks - ie: SLA for response times in discord - but also solutions to grow analysts to become better and more effective at understanding the data and creating powerful outcomes with it. A critical part of the process is growing active community members, educating them, and inspiring them to maintain activity within the ecosystem.
Query Sourcing, Analytics Validation and Bounty Delivery:
This is the dark horse: surprisingly complex and very time consuming, but delivers huge dividends. Includes gathering analytical needs from the protocol itself (Uniswap Labs and others who maintain the technology) as well as from the community - identifying opportunities called out in social forums. One very difficult component is then transforming asks into clear bounty-structures (some questions require PHD-level inspiration to ask effectively) and then a magnified task is to QA the outcomes. We pride ourselves on ensuring the data, whether visualized or API, meets quality standards. Finally, we need to deliver the bounties themselves. There is considerable data tracking, wallet management and accounting here.
Interactive [Premium] Analytics:
In addition to managing analysts to deliver via queries and bounties, the program includes special programs for premium analytics. The Uniswap v3 Calculator is part of this. It requires our team of data scientists plus the top 1% of the analyst community to focus on special cases. Ultimately we scope interactive modules (like the Calculator) and will keep delivering these.
Investment Management:
As called out in the question, yes a portion of this is managing the assets in the liquidity pools, or other effective structure to create yield. We have a team that works on this specifically - in addition to the actual monitoring of this, there is asset custody and tracking, and other technical issues to ensure there are checks and balances on the assets we maintain. Your question seems to call out these fees specifically, aligning them with a venture fund structure or otherwise. We actually don’t consider this a critical part of the fee structure > it’s all of the details above that make the program incredibly special.
A final note on the recommendation of an up front fee or fees that decline over time. We actually performed the up front work for this program pro bono, to enable early analytics access to v3 when it launched. We then received a small grant from the Uniswap Grant Program to run a few bounties [we self funded close to $100k in bounties ourselves to prove the model]. We wish our costs declined over time, but as you can see from the above, the fees are all linear. We can’t reduce the time on query sourcing (which actually becomes more difficult as more questions get answered) or data management or any of the others.
In a nutshell our fees consist of technical requirements (plus IP), program delivery and management and, yes, investment management. Believe us, we wish there were days it was simpler to deliver a premium service — but we believe strongly in enabling blockchains to live up to their full potential, and this is the way to do that.
We have structured this as a 1:1 strategy, whereby every time we get paid UNI it is put into the hands of the community. That feels appropriate and aligned to continue to build a great ecosystem together.