Hi all, we appreciate all of your additional comments, and feedback shared in, over the last few days.
Transparency + Accountability
Reporting
We have received some questions about how to check in on the status of grants. The best place to go is our 2024 Community Impact Report - it dives into progress and KPIs achieved by every grant we have made in the last year+. To learn more about grantees, you can watch a few of our past Community Calls on our Youtube channel, or sign up for future Community Calls here.
In the coming year, we commit to continuing the cadence of our existing transparency measures: biannual Community Impact Reports, monthly Community Calls, quarterly financial transparency reports, and grant initiative announcement and update blog posts.
UF<>Delegate Feedback Mechanism
We’ve heard constructive feedback on ways to tighten the feedback loop between the UF and Uniswap delegates – one of those ideas was a forum in which delegates can meet with UF leadership to review and give feedback on the UF’s strategy and execution.
For this endeavor to be effective, it must be designed in tandem between the UF and delegates. Erin just posted to kick off discussion on some key parameters for this forum – we are excited to hear your ideas, and to work together to get this set up.
Governance
Core Contributor Lifecycle
The long-term goal of our core contributor work is to support Uniswap Governance and community sustainability. This is ultimately a program to arm Governance with the tools and infrastructure required to create value for itself over a long term time period.
Some of the inputs into success here include:
- Evolving Uniswap Governance’s operational capacity. A key initiative here is our continued diligence into the DUNA, which we believe will result in a governance proposal in the coming months.
- Finding projects and teams to fund, and sizing allocation to these projects/teams appropriately. Our work with CFMs, if successful, may support this at large scale, potentially in tandem with other approaches, in the future. While CFMs are built out, the UF will also learn from onboarding a first set of core contributors for initial work.
- Aligning incentives of contributors with the Uniswap community. Governance controls a large treasury of UNI tokens, which may be used to align incentives with these teams.
In the future, we envision a culture which attracts top tier DeFi development teams to the Uniswap DAO to raise funds as an alternative to other forms of funding, like VC funding. We envision a process by which these teams may mutually agree to a defined vision or scope with the DAO, and by which the DAO can properly size an allocation of vested UNI to the team over time. We envision multiple teams building complementary protocols, infrastructure, and more, each of which accrues value to the Uniswap community.
Over the coming months, these are the things the UF plans to do to kick us off on this journey.
- Iterate upon CFM design, starting shortly with our first implementation (here).
- Finalize diligence and kick off governance proposal to create a legal entity for the DAO.
- Hire a Core Contributor Coordinator whose job will be to work with the DAO to begin to form supportive structures for communication and feedback loops between delegates and the UF, delegates and Core Contributors, and to begin to develop DAO-centric structures along with delegates to support Core Contributors in the future.
- Kick off discussions with initial possible Core Contributors, scope out initial milestones, and disburse initial grants.
Growth and Sustainability
Several delegates raised concerns about the size of this budget request through the lens of the UTWG’s report, which included projected expenses. We cited our thoughts on this report in our first comment above.
To expand our thinking: long-term sustainability is of course important, however the Uniswap Protocol, and certainly its developer ecosystem, are in startup mode. Startups require an upfront allocation of resources in order to grow. Without initial support, a startup will flounder – stagnation early in a startups’ life does not lead to long-term sustainability. We believe the programs outlined in these proposals will drive long-term ecosystem value, ultimately ensuring sustainability once growth stabilizes.