First off we’d like to give @davebalter and Flipside credit for working on this proposal and for attempting to put the UNI treasury to work. We acknowledge that we’ve been passive here, and apologize for showing up late.
As UNI holders and stewards for hundreds of Uniswap dashboards creators we called attention to this proposal because it is risky and biased, and was seemingly passing without much community attention. Our objections to this proposal are largely echoed by a16z’s thoughtful comment above and is summarized below.
UP1.2 is essentially bundle of three things
- Funding grants with yield farming
- UNI analytics grants
- Funding of Flipsides operations
In our opinion there’s no obvious reason to bundle these together.
1. Funding grants with yield
While funding grants with yield is an interesting idea at large, this proposal was essentially for a data analytics provider to manage $25M of the UNI community’s treasury. There are plenty of important questions around risk, operations and checks and balances of capital management in and of itself. What happens if the money is lost? What is the appropriate amount of risk? Managing capital is a profession for a reason and from our perspective a totally separate matter to an analytics grant. If the UNI community wants to allocate funds in this manner, we encourage a separate proposal to deal with that and there’s already a discussion of this in another thread initiated by @wijuwiju.
2. Analytics grants
We are super excited to see UNI funds go towards creation of great analytics dashboards by funding community creators and education. However, this proposal is not credibly provider neutral. Flipside employees and investors were overrepresented on both the allocation committee and the oversight board.
3. Flipside Operational funding
Our take is that grants from the UNI treasury towards analytics should go to community creators, not Dune and not Flipside. Creators are the scarce resource for Uniswap, not the actual data tables.
There are plenty of analytics tools and providers that get funding from VCs, tokens and/or revenue. There’s no obvious reason for UNI holders to subsidise one of these, but if they want to it should be an explicit vendor/DAO arrangement, with clear SLA, the option to cancel etc. This is something different than a community analytics bounty program.
Summing up
All in all we think the proposal is overly complex and is not vendor neutral.
We would love to help funnel UNI grants to dashboard creators with a proposal that ensures that the actual community creators get the money and it is straightforward for UNI holders to understand what they are paying for.
With this as the backbone we are already working on a UNI community analytics proposal. We’d love to discuss how to best enable UNI analytics with everyone that voted last week, data providers and the Uniswap community broadly.