You guys know I support and respect you as lawyers, and you’ve done some great work, but AFAIK you have flagrantly broken almost every transparency and accountability promise made during the initial solicitation–which I and others predicted would happen. You even had technical assistance offers from projects like Tally to help remain transparent and accountable, and instead you went completely offchain and opaque and dumped UNI way faster than indicated.
$30M is a lot of money and we don’t know how it was spent–I have to suppose it mainly benefited whiteshoe biglaw partners who mostly do not care about crypto
You also do not do a very good job looping in the interests of smaller non-blue-chip, non-a16z/Paradigm-backed projects and the broader legal community. I realize I’ve personally collaborated with you guys on a few things but overall it feels very opaque and like a small cabal of elite lawyers dominating all crypto legal discussions/decisions, mostly behind closed doors while using “politicians won’t talk to us if we collaborate more (outside our bubble)” as an excuse.
This is not how DAOs are supposed to work. You should create a more accountable & transparent structure for this funding round–not just based on promises this time, but with a real structure such as use of a DAO-adjacent multisig with some checks/balances on it as well as concrete commitments to loop in the broader cryptolaw community–and then I would happily support it as you have done some great work.
Even if one accepts that spending another $8M in UNI tokens on legal is a great idea, there are much more effective ways to spend than paying biglaw partners $1k+ per hour to spill ink. For example, what massive legal safety benefits FOR THE ENTIRE ECOSYSTEM could $8M in funding to a decentralized front-end project deliver? We all know that ultimately, decentralization is the only protection against fickle regulators and governments.
The other thing is that if you’re going to throw millions of dollars at lawyers with little extrinsic oversight or transparency, at least give some thought to the governance. One board member is CEO of Polygon, another is GC of Polygon, and another is GC of Variant, which is heavily invested in Polygon–Polygon is a fine project, I have nothing against it, but how does this make sense as governance for an organization that is supposed to be for all of DeFi???
P.S.–this post from Cobie is still the funniest take of all time on this subject: https://gov.uniswap.org/t/proposal-removal-of-established-cranial-follicles-fund/13314