How to prevent exchanges and/or a few whales from taking over governance

#1

Open to any and all ideas. We need to prohibit exchanges holding UNI like Coinbase and Binance from having enough voting power to vote themselves whatever they like, while also preventing a few whales from conspiring to enrich themselves at the expense of everyone else.

If we dont prevent this from happening, they could simply vote to drop themselves all of the UNI to a few wallets and then dump it.

I still like the idea of pre-snapshot wallets and liquidity providers getting small airdrops each year as a way to cut down on this from happening.

14 Likes
#2

Agree this is important especially in light of Kucoins recent fiasco not only is there the risk of the CEX making changes that would benefit them but there;s the risk of centralized exchanges losing their funds to hackers and then from there its a downward spiral.

Sadly the guy with the money always wins would also be interested to see peoples views on this topic and maybe even a vote on the snapshot page eventually after a bit more discussion

10 Likes
#3

I have many uni on coinbase much more than in my wallet …i only keep the 400 in the wallet for now. If i can use these uni in a BOOST (check out the UNI BOOST proposal idea) i would take them of the exchange to stake them in Uniswap.
But i can promise you coinbase can never use my uni to vote. So you can buy some on coinbase and prevent this idea.

#4

What if voting weightage is limited to a certain maximum such that no one vote has centralized delegation to attempt to game the voting system and blackhat delegators has to be more distributed to more individuals/accounts in order to “attempt to gain the system” (thereby increasing resources required to maintain more delegators from a central blackhat organization)?
Here’s an example of what goes in my head (assuming all proposal & voting requirements are met according to UNI blog https://uniswap.org/blog/uni/):

Scenario 1 - no max cap, all based on UNI ownership, proposal to benefit Voter A/X conspirers.
Voter A (owns 50mil UNIs) —> Votes YES (weightage = 50mil, meets 4% UNI supply (>40mil) to vote “yes”)
Voter B (owns 20mil UNIs) —> Votes NO (weightage = 20mil)
Delegate X (has 200mil UNIs from 5 whales) —> Votes YES (weightage = 200mil)
Delegate Y (has 80mil UNIs from 1000 voters) —> Votes NO (weightage = 80mil)
Total YES = 250mil. Total NO = 100mil
(PROPOSAL = YES, status quo benefit Voter A/X)

Scenario 2 - Max cap weightage/voter = 50mil, proposal to benefit Voter A/X conspirers.
Voter A (owns 50mil UNIs) —> Votes YES (weightage = 50mil)
Voter B (owns 20mil UNIs) —> Votes NO (weightage = 20mil)
Delegate X (has 200mil UNIs from 5 whales) —> Votes YES (weightage = 50mil)
Delegate Y (has 80mil UNIs from 1000 voters) —> Votes NO (weightage = 80mil)
Total YES = 100mil. Total NO = 100mil
(PROPOSAL = NO(tie), status quo maintained)

3 Likes
#5

Love the idea behind this, clearly very well thought out and I find your scenarios very clear and precise… I think it would go a long way to help prevent gaming of the system which we’re at risk of due to CEX buying so many tokens.

Hopefully others will weigh in and we can move this forward to the Snapshot Page for preliminary voting after more discussion

1 Like
#6

Ohh, que noticia importa. Gracias

#7

Well, we certainly can think of the mechanisms that would make life more difficult for the whales.
But to be realistic, there’s not much we can do about it.
What @ZannLii2 proposed unfortunately would just make things worse.
Because it’s really easy to split your UNI between 1000 addresses for a whale. Almost the same effort comes with 10000 addresses - it’s easy for whales to automate.
This proposition can be easily gamed.

And there’s also a causality issue: in order to implement protectionist measures you need enough votes in the present voting system, to begin with.

But the main problem is you need a lot of people who own a small amount of UNI to mobilize. To be participating in governance, to be interested in voting, etc. And to be united by the same interests.

UNI token distribution is a very inspiring event in my opinion. But as we can see from the level of activity on the forum so far, apparently not many people are that interested in Uniswap governance.

But it’s not all bad. A lot of tokens will belong to investors and the team, who probably will be vote more actively. And a lot of tokens belong to liquidity providers on Uniswap. Overall I consider the distribution as safe for the most part.

5 Likes
#8

Would agree it’s unfortunate that this is the case but there is also no point denying the truth but I think once Admins lay down some proper ground rules for this forum and spell out clearly that this forum is for the Purposes of Government and not a general forum then I think we will start to weed out these duplicate accounts and account here purely for the airdrops and start to see the accounts that really care for governance and the greater good of Uniswap.

I do think the accounts and people exist on here but that they’re unfortunately hidden by the mass amount of duplicate accounts of people who want to try and get their repetitive airdrop questions answered

2 Likes
#9

Very well spoken Mr_po, you can in theory make a process that works. but if you know the process you can back the process.
Look at working with them to make a better future for all.
I love to see Coinbase building on top op Uni, and i think we need to make it interesting fore them to engage in the governance of Uni, thy have a loot of expertise and experience and know what works.

1 Like
#10

I agree, a lot of coins on centralized exchanges is a problem. We have seen that when CZ used the coins from his customers to vote on a STEAM takeover

1 Like
#11

Overall, it’s a good direction of thinking:

What vulnerabilities in terms of governance does the present system present?

Can it get overrun? How?

Of course, it is much better to think of these things beforehand than after they’ve already happened.

But it’s not the whales we should be looking to get protection from.

We need to protect against bad actors .

Who could benefit from Uniswap failing to the extent that it would be worth sacrificing the value one would have otherwise?

Currently, I can’t think of an equation where, if you’re a rational actor, it’s beneficial for you to compromise Uniswap governance in a blatantly harmful way.

But it doesn’t mean we should stop thinking about that at all. Maybe think more in-depth about the conditions that would make such overrun profitable for a rational actor.

1 Like
#12

I like this line of thinking. The airdrop event was a great catalyst, perhaps enough of one to engage a critical mass of small holders to want to participate in governance - This will be my first foray. How to approach weighted voting, countering manipulation, fear of whale dumps are important considerations as we may one day retire on this. I caught myself feeling a little disappointed that I was too late to check out Andre Cronje’s oversubscribed proposal but that’s exactly what we’re trying to avoid isn’t it? A group asking questions aimed at keeping the 200k+ little guys relevant is interesting to me. We all know crypto is infested with bad actors, the question is should I take my money and run or if I help to grow something, will my windfall be secure? On the strength of what I’ve read so far, if this group organized into something with a delegation address - I might likely delegate to it and I think a lot of other people would too without necessarily participating in the dialogue, enough to surprise us all perhaps.

#13

With solutions like BrightID (Proof of Uniqueness), it becomes much more difficult to do that actually. Hence the solutions of weighting whales and other people differently is not totally impossible technically, although not 100% reliable yet.

Not sure if this is something we would want though.

#14

There is a decent possibility that Compound will transform Uniswap governance, bringing more power to large UNI holders.

There is a proposal there that will allow for UNI held there to vote.

By the way, currently, Compound offers 5.88% APY on UNI.

More ‘minority’ votes will unwillingly vote the way the ‘majority’ wants with that system.

#16

I’d prefer for there to be no delegation allowed if that were the case I wouldn’t have been so opposed to the first vote. And even if some whale just split there uni between 1k accounts that would prohibitively expensive to do so and then the fees in each account to vote…